I have decided to just write a mini-novella and write a book simaler to (in the teraform bug) but with no storyline related to OP2... It just got to difficult to try and stick to any extent to the OP2 storyline.
Feel free to bounce ideas for
~names
~places (like town and buildings) and
~bits of dialauge that might fit.
EDIT: Increased numberr so Hooman would be on that boat. (hooman, you on the greatest minds part there.
The Beginning Of The End.
We are here to warn you of a disastrous event. It will be your demise… all of you. There is hope. However, it is only for a few of you. It will involve your utmost cooperation. If you don’t than the last of humanity will die with you. The 800 total people, being the greatest scientific minds( 200 each of scientists and engineers) , 50 artists, 50 musicians, 50 writers, and 50 people who can speak all of your languages fluently, will be traveling with us. I know this may sound like very few, but it is all that we can take with us. We are trying to save you from yourselves. That is the most difficult task of all.
Sorry, you must be terribly confused. You have joined to late in time to have heard the beginning. Well, as the old saying goes, a story worth telling once is worth telling twice.
The year was 2050. We had safely established a colony on mars and we had ‘de-teraformed’ Venus. We are working on a colony builder to be sent there. We have recently begun to explore E.T. planets. We have found one that, we believe, will yield Earth-like results. We have been experimenting with Teraformation in microbe form for years now. But the results haven’t brought any light on the situation. Then, 10 years later, we discover a bug that works, but terribly slowly. It works at twice the speed of human Teraformation, but is still much slower than we’d like. But it makes do on Venus, allowing us a colony that is about the same advancement as that of Mars. Then, after we tried to teraform new planets, it went wrong. The bug went out of control. So many dead and dying we just left them… but the bug caught onto one of the evacuation transports and killed everyone aboard. We don’t know how it happened we just know that it did. I remember that day like nothing else. “Disaster on Exo-planet-Earth” the newscaster said. “It’s been reported that a evacuation transport has been destroyed by the teraforming ‘bug’. All Passenger and crew are presumed dead.” I stopped listening after that, but those first words had gotten straight to the point. The world was going to hell and no one could stop it.
The terror didn’t entirely set in until the next day. All those who had heard about the incident really didn’t believe it and thought it was simply scare mongering. Trying to get money for research. However, I knew what the bug was capable of. After all, it could turn raw rock into biological components. Using chemical enzymes to split apart the elements within, somehow gaining energy and dividing. It didn’t exactly do it fast, but it did it effectively. Byproducts of the reactions were Nitrogen and Oxygen, the two main components of Earths atmosphere. The Nitrogen was useful for several reasons, mostly because it enabled Nitrogen farms to be made and put into plant soil as fertilizer. There was a second symbiotic portion of the bug, it wasn’t entirely one organism, and wasn’t designed to be so. The second portion allowed the release of small amounts of hydrogen. Not enough to actually pose much of a threat, not immediately at any rate, more like just enough to ‘burn’ into water molecules. This enabled the third ‘phase’ of the reaction.
With water and some Carbon remaining from some of the rocks, and Sulpher for the second part of the symbiotic pair, it enabled the cell to gain back some energy. All of these reactions carefully and effectively made. You needed some energy to jump-start the reaction, and that was provided by allowing a small ‘bubble’ around an area with plants and some water inside.
However, on the ships, it could do whatever it pleased… as it absorbed the ship and its biological elements, it became semi-sentient. Evolving faster than anything else, it grew through the phases that most animals took centuries, millennia even, to go through. By the time it realized it was ‘alive’ and could think, a baby born at the time of the initial incident could just start to walk and talk. This being could pilot an entire spacecraft. It read the ships databases, having formed a bond with the electronic components even stronger and faster then the Savants had. It grew with both intelligence, and in yearning for more strength and power. Its own chemical reactions gave the ‘being’ a way to power itself, realizing how the thrusters could still be used to combine liquid oxygen and hydrogen, it began to produce the two gasses as much as possible, capturing the waste water and re-using it to fuel the reactions. It only lost about 1% of water for every 10 AU it pushed itself.
I might sound all over. I realize that, but I’m telling you the important details. You need to know how the virus works in order to defeat it don’t you? Well, that’s our issue. None of us truly understood how it could adapt so quickly. It’s as if all it did was think… Think and want. Yearn. It wanted something… and in our time, it still does. We need to figure out what that is… if we don’t; it could spell disaster for the human race.
It continued on its trajectory, following the passageways that the main ships used… occasionally it would send small ‘boarding parties’ to another ship… they wouldn’t even know that it was on board until to late. The media played it down, hardly discussing the matter. The few of us who knew were trying to get the word out, but when the average person does nothing but go ‘if it isn’t on the news, it probably isn’t important’ and ignored all that was wrong with parts of the world, it was difficult to get noticed. The governments at the time realized what was wrong. They knew we could help and wanted us to figure it out.
The thing is, we couldn’t. No-one knew why it did this… what it wanted. At that point in time, we didn’t even know HOW it evolved so fast. Then the report came in that on all the incoming ‘data-seals’ that were an equivalent black-box system for small ships and spacecraft before the Ansible was made, that all the seals (18 in total) on the mini-gene bank had been destroyed or disabled, and it had the genetic material of 20 different animals, and had apparently chose the greatest qualities of each. I laughed internally, thinking back to the now extinct platypus. Such a mash up of creatures Marsupials were, but they survived for a reason… they adapted. We blared across the Ansible, our method of ‘faster than light’ long range communications, to avoid all ships with any un-responsive Savants aboard. It did end up losing us 2 ships of survivors who’s savants had been damage, but it stemmed further losses to the bug. Then it began.
The all out war began. Apparently, oblivious to all of us, it had started its own colony, terraforming a planet in its own image, making several of its own species of animals… it seemed to begin amassing a large arsenal of both star fighters and ground militia… these new creatures were overpowered in 100s of ways… They could almost jump 3 times higher in our gravity, had sensory organs similar to those of a cat or puma, whiskers allowing them to sense vibrations in the air. They were the perfect hunters. And we were their prey. Almost as if had been specifically designed so. Not almost. It was designed so that we would be wiped out.
