The Red Planet
Wrench in hand, he touched the glass window as he stared at the red planet their ship slowly passed.
“Do you know what that planet is, C401?”
He turned to J827, his tech partner for the day. The kid was tinkering with scrap parts again, and today, she was working with a metal sphere with a switch, light tubes, and plenty of steel wire.
She looked up briefly, then shrugged. “I don’t recall ever being in this sector before. Why ask?” Her focus immediately went back to the parts she was working on, and she screwed a tube unto the sphere.
“I just thought about Sol-3. It was right next to a red planet like this one, right?”
J827 scoffed. She hit the switch on her invention, but nothing seemed to happen. “Please, C401. Not this again. Sol-3 is dead. Everybody knows that its system died ages ago, after its star burned out. There’s nothing left there, okay? If there were, one of the scouting ships would have told the flotilla about it.” She tapped the switch several times, to no avail. “Stop dreaming and check out why this isn’t working, will you?”
He turned to the girl, who the contraption in his hands. He frowned and used his wrench to tinker with it.
“Well, what if it’s all a big conspiracy?” He continued talking as he removed a few screws and adjusted a few wires. “What if the Sol system did survive and there is still something left for us there? Somewhere we could all return home to?”
He heard her sigh in reply. After one last tug at the wires, he gently hit the switch. The light from the bulbs shone with color, splashing the room’s sterile white walls with bright pinks and blues and yellows. They stared in awe at the colorful display, one they weren’t used to seeing lately due to all the power-saving measures the Council had in place.
They looked at each other and grinned.
He handed her the sphere and continued. “Aren’t you in the least bit curious? Just imagine being on the origin planet and discovering our roots, our history, our ancestors’ home! What an adventure!”
She looked the ball of light over, then shrugged. “No, C401. I am not curious about that at all. And you shouldn’t fill your head with fantasies either; we have enough troubles here.”
J827 threw the sphere his way, and he caught it. The door to the hall then slid open, and she left, leaving him with his dreams about a dead planet and the ball of colored lights.
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Image source: deviantart.com/csakesz182/art/Planet-285541568
First written January 27, 2018.
#118