New Earth
By Joshua Mauldin
It’s a weird feeling being born a twenty-eight year old adult. Or, at least what I think the equivalent of being born would be like. Awakening for the first time in your life is traumatic, to say the least. Senses and means of perception are overloaded. I like to think I handled it better than most, but worse than some; I was able to watch all the others wake after me.
Not knowing who or where I was – yet having basic human instincts, knowledge, and cognitive functions – I felt a deep tremble shake my core. My chest tightened and my eyes burned. When I tried to remember something, anything, prior to my pod “birthing” me, there was a stagnant white and nothing else. For all I knew, I could have been a pure-bred, born and raised human before the pod just as easily as I could have been an artificial cell, mutated inside a Petri dish of wires, nano-tech, and goo.
So I sat, shivering, legs pulled to my chest. I leaned back against my metallic pod and cradled my head. It hurt to even think. I tried to glance around again, but under the intense, platinum-white glow everything was blurry and distorted; my brain was getting more electrical impulses than it could handle, faster than it could process them.
I shut my eyes again.
As information clashed with knowledge, my world was painted with incomprehensible colors – like a blind man seeing flesh-pink clouds fading into a fiery yellow-orange sunset for the first time. He has information on what a sunset is, and an idea on what it looks like, but until he sees it for the first time, he doesn’t really know.
The pod across from me hissed, puffed steam around its edges, and the quicksilver convex lid slowly lifted. I peeked out of one eye, wincing in the fluorescent light, and saw what my brain processed to be a beautiful woman. As she rolled, falling, out of that husk of a womb, she coughed up goo and curled up into herself. As my sight adjusted, I saw her petite fingers tremble and twitch, clawing slowly at the cold steel beneath her. Her eyes flickered open for a brief second, and they flashed a brilliant shade of blue – a color I imagined a tropical ocean to shimmer coolly.
I noticed a small sign above her pod. Emblazoned in thick, black lines were three letters: EVE. Was that her name? The meek title by which people identify themselves? I turned to see if I had a sign. I did.
Mine read: ADAM.
I glanced across the way at Eve, and, despite being new to existence, felt a strange attraction to her. As I gathered myself to speak, a face abruptly appeared at the forefront of the room, on a holographic screen of some sort. To my bewilderment, it spoke.
“Greetings. If you are receiving this message, then you are all that survives of the Human race. You have been on a stasis ship for the past–” in an electronic voice from what I guessed to be an automated calendar, “twenty-eight years, seven months, fourteen days, twenty-two hours, five minutes and fifty-four seconds,” and the normal voice resumed, “orbiting the long-since destroyed Earth. You twelve are all that remain of a world-ending nuclear holocaust, and the sole purpose of your creation is for rebuilding a new world upon the ashes of the old. The history of New Earth begins today.”
- - -
Biography: I'm a college student, and I live with my two cousins and my cat, Sam. I love anything thought-provoking, and I enjoy sitting around and thinking up more science-fiction and fantasy stories than I can count.
By Joshua Mauldin
It’s a weird feeling being born a twenty-eight year old adult. Or, at least what I think the equivalent of being born would be like. Awakening for the first time in your life is traumatic, to say the least. Senses and means of perception are overloaded. I like to think I handled it better than most, but worse than some; I was able to watch all the others wake after me.
Not knowing who or where I was – yet having basic human instincts, knowledge, and cognitive functions – I felt a deep tremble shake my core. My chest tightened and my eyes burned. When I tried to remember something, anything, prior to my pod “birthing” me, there was a stagnant white and nothing else. For all I knew, I could have been a pure-bred, born and raised human before the pod just as easily as I could have been an artificial cell, mutated inside a Petri dish of wires, nano-tech, and goo.
So I sat, shivering, legs pulled to my chest. I leaned back against my metallic pod and cradled my head. It hurt to even think. I tried to glance around again, but under the intense, platinum-white glow everything was blurry and distorted; my brain was getting more electrical impulses than it could handle, faster than it could process them.
I shut my eyes again.
As information clashed with knowledge, my world was painted with incomprehensible colors – like a blind man seeing flesh-pink clouds fading into a fiery yellow-orange sunset for the first time. He has information on what a sunset is, and an idea on what it looks like, but until he sees it for the first time, he doesn’t really know.
The pod across from me hissed, puffed steam around its edges, and the quicksilver convex lid slowly lifted. I peeked out of one eye, wincing in the fluorescent light, and saw what my brain processed to be a beautiful woman. As she rolled, falling, out of that husk of a womb, she coughed up goo and curled up into herself. As my sight adjusted, I saw her petite fingers tremble and twitch, clawing slowly at the cold steel beneath her. Her eyes flickered open for a brief second, and they flashed a brilliant shade of blue – a color I imagined a tropical ocean to shimmer coolly.
I noticed a small sign above her pod. Emblazoned in thick, black lines were three letters: EVE. Was that her name? The meek title by which people identify themselves? I turned to see if I had a sign. I did.
Mine read: ADAM.
I glanced across the way at Eve, and, despite being new to existence, felt a strange attraction to her. As I gathered myself to speak, a face abruptly appeared at the forefront of the room, on a holographic screen of some sort. To my bewilderment, it spoke.
“Greetings. If you are receiving this message, then you are all that survives of the Human race. You have been on a stasis ship for the past–” in an electronic voice from what I guessed to be an automated calendar, “twenty-eight years, seven months, fourteen days, twenty-two hours, five minutes and fifty-four seconds,” and the normal voice resumed, “orbiting the long-since destroyed Earth. You twelve are all that remain of a world-ending nuclear holocaust, and the sole purpose of your creation is for rebuilding a new world upon the ashes of the old. The history of New Earth begins today.”
- - -
Biography: I'm a college student, and I live with my two cousins and my cat, Sam. I love anything thought-provoking, and I enjoy sitting around and thinking up more science-fiction and fantasy stories than I can count.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I like it.
oh wow, that was absolutely fantastic.i always enjoy reading this kind of thing.
Cool, this was great.