COMMUNIQUÉ: URGENT MESSAGE TO FOLLOW
TO: EVENT 3 COMMANDER
SUBJ: COLLECTED INTELLIDIARY™
THE FOLLOWING INTELLIDIARY™ WAS CAPTURED BY TREK-SCAN™ NODE 916 AND TRANSMITTED BACK TO EVENT 3 COMMAND FOR YOUR REVIEW AND APPROVAL. IT IS BELIEVED THIS INTELLIDIARY™ IS PART OF THE MORNINGSTAR CHRONICLES FROM THE FAILED MORNINGSTAR MISSION. CAREFUL REVIEW IS ADVISED. ENSURE ALL UNAUTHORIZED PORTIONS ARE REDACTED PRIOR TO TRANSMISSION TO THE COMMITTÉE.
TRANSCRIPTION OF INTELLIDIARY™ TO FOLLOW
The Élisa Diaries
161-2149: Père gave me this today! He made me promise to capture in it every day so I could track my entire voyage. I can’t wait, my own IntelliDiary™! I told him I’ll always write in it, no matter how busy I get, I’ll always make time. I wish he was coming with me, but he says the voyage is only for the young, I don’t know what that means, but it makes me laugh when he says it. I’ll miss him the most!
162-2149: Mom says I’m lucky to have been chosen. That there were thousands of parents who put their children on the list, but she says only the best and brightest got chosen for the voyage. Klein says, only parents with more than one child had children chosen, so I’m not special, I think he’s just jealous that he didn’t get picked like me!
163-2149: How did Earthwalkers run out of fresh water? Why didn’t they just TeleMark™ themselves new water like I do when I’m thirsty? Stupid Earthwalkers, no wonder why they all died.
165-2149: I wonder what it is going to be like stepping on real ground. My instructor says, it I will feel a lot heavier. Then the other kids started making fun of me saying I was going to instantly get fat when I touch Morning Star. I hate them! I can’t wait to leave them all here on this stupid tin can. The instructor told them that all people were heavier when the Earthwalkers lived on Earth. It’s only because we live on CielMonde™ now that we are all lighter. Instructor seems old, I wonder if instructor is old enough to remember the weight of Earth.
168-2149: They’ve picked a date for the mission! They said that due to solar flares expected in the near future, they are stepping up the timetable! Only three weeks!! Klein says its cuz everyone on the station is running out of water faster than they predicted. He must hear this crazy stuff at secondary from his stupid friends, except James, James is nice.
173-2149: Why can’t my whole family go? I’m going to miss them. Père says it’s because not everyone is as brave as me, but I know that’s not true. Papa was one of the bravest and he didn’t get to go to Mars on Event 1.
181-2149: I don’t want to go. What if I don’t come back? What happens then? No one has really told me what the voyage is, just that we are going to Morning Star. What do they think we are going to find on Morning Star? Something we weren’t able to find on Mars? Something better than what we ruined on Earth?
184-2149: I asked instructor today and instructor said no one knows what we will find on Morning Star, but since Mars turned out to be such a disaster, that Morning Star is our last real hope of terraforming. Instructor said that no one has ever been to the surface of Morning Star, that the atmosphere is choked with carbon dioxide and it rains sulfuric acid; just like it does on Earth now. The first probes sent to Morning Star only lasted 19 minutes in the atmosphere before being completely dissolved by the acid rain. Only one probe made it to the surface, but was too badly damaged by that time to transmit anything useful back.
185-2149: They should send another probe! I DON’T WANT TO GO! James was at balance, and we talked for hours! It was probably only a few minutes, but it seemed like forever. I didn’t want to stop talking to him. I’m about to leave on a voyage and he finally gets brave enough to talk to me, of course that’s how it works out for me!
186-2149: Instructor says that the oceans choked first. The sheer imbalance of polypropylene to water became unmanageable by the marine ecosystem. How could they have been so stupid to make things they didn’t understand? Then dispose of it without any type of social obligation to community or environment? Instructor says that’s why polypropylene is banned on the station. We can’t risk it getting into our drinking water, it’s the only closed-system water we have left. When Earthwalkers finally woke up and realized that they were killing their own world, they started putting scientists in charge, but it was already too late. Insects and reptiles were the first ones to feel the impact of the climate transition, but they were deemed so ‘insignificant’ by the Earthwalkers that they barely took notice of their disappearance. Why did it take them so long to connect the dots? Didn’t they understand that everything was interconnected? The toxicity of the entire planet had reached an unbearable level, heavy metals and other toxins in the soil, air and water collected in the smallest animals’ brains and created ‘symptoms’ that they called other things at first. Rabies, Colony Collapse Disorder, mass die-offs, sea whales Cetacean strandings, all were misdiagnoses of a much larger problem, massive levels of contamination. That was the age now known as The Onset. When the oceans stopped the birds quickly followed. This was what finally got the Earthwalkers’ attention. It wasn’t that they were the most important, or the first to go, it was the fact that they were the most noticeable. No song birds in the mornings, no mass migrations of airborne beasts. That’s when Earthwalkers started to exhibit psychological problems of their own. The dramatic shift of something so noticeable had mass mental impact on the Earthwalker species. They started to exhibit signs of mass depression. I can’t even imagine, an entire species thrown into fits of depression together. The results were catastrophic the instructor said. Massive wars, genocide, murder, mass suicide, complete mayhem. So egotistical of them not to realize that something so small as a plant or bird would have had such a massive impact on their psyche. It must have been horrible seeing those changes all around and not being able to comprehend what was happening. Luckily for us, LesFaiseurs realized what was happening and helped a small group of us emerge from The Transition, although I can’t say I don’t dream about what it would be like to live back on Earth rather than in this tin can!
201-2149: So much has been going on! Our mission date had to be pushed back because of another failure to the AirExchange™ system on Deck D. Everyone that didn’t get out within the first few seconds (which was only a handful) is still in there, dead…just dead. Dropped right in the middle of whatever they were doing. All of us were at Event 2 headquarters when we heard about it. Kids I’m with, their whole families were in there. That’s where James lived too.
202-2149: Now I understand why we are going. We can’t continue on here, just like the Earthwalkers couldn’t continue on Earth. Another sustainable option has to be found. Terraforming Morning Star is our last hope.
203-2149: Mission day! This will be short, but I hope we are successful for everyone’s sake. I said bye to my family, seeing Père cry made me cry too. Last time I’ll probably see any of them; Klein didn’t seem to care.
303-2149: Suspended state sucked, although it slowed my aging, so I won’t complain about that. The slow-motion training thoughts they fed us while suspended are still messing with me. Sometimes I can’t tell if I am still going in slow-motion or regular speed. I’m not the only one though, one of the kids (well doesn’t seem like a kid anymore) forgot to chew and almost choked himself at first meal. We are only a few days away from Morning Star now. It is beautiful in the observatory portal, much better than the pictures.
305-2149: Our PulseEngine™ is failing and the engineer says it can’t be fixed. We are at the outer limit of the TerraPod™’s range, but we are going to have to push it, or stick around until total system failure. I keep thinking of those poor people on Deck D, but maybe they were spared a slow and agonizing die-off.
306-2149: Everything is set, we leave Event 2 today for Morning Star. It almost fills our entire observatory portal now, so bight iridescent blue. I’ll capture again once I settle into TerraPod™ life.
308-2149: Things happened in transit and not everything is functioning properly. Some of the flora decayed in transit, this will slow the terraforming process. Luckily life-support and the CoatAll™ system are working. I just hope the sodium bicarbonate coating actually counteracts the sulfuric acid in the atmosphere like command said it would. Dissolved in sulfuric acid would be worse than asphyxiated instantly I think.
315-2149: We reached the surface without incident! Even though I haven’t stepped foot on Morning Star yet, I do feel heavier, just like instructor said I would! I’m excited to think that I might be only days away from setting foot on actual ground. I wonder if Morning Star will ever have grass, enough to roll around in; like the old picture Père had.
315-2149: Drilling began only hours after we touched down. Current depth – 250 meters, it is progressing slower than we anticipated. Hopefully we are able to reach our target depth and get everything down before the coating system runs out.
317-2149: The incessant drilling, I can’t sleep. I hang somewhere in between asleep and awake. I can’t stop thinking back to my lessons while we drill down into the unknown. I can’t stop thinking about how it finally ended on Earth. One small pop of a bubble as the ice around it melted and the Antarctic wind took care of the rest. Sweeping the unknown bacteria out into the warmer ocean where it bloomed and infected everything. What little life there was left in the oceans was gone in weeks, reptiles quickly followed, then the avalanche hit land and was unstoppable. It ate everything in its path, Vostok Disease killed everything that was left. Only those that had already traveled to CielMonde™ survived. It must have been horrible, the pain, the suffering, watching everything around you rupture and hemorrhage open onto itself. This is what I lay half awake, half asleep dreaming of. My family hemorrhaging open in front of me, as we drill further and further into the unknown.
320-2149: We hit something unexpected today. A large void in the terra layers. Everything we had been taught about Morning Star was that no voids should exist within the predicted base layers of the planet. The void extended more than 30 meters down, which brought us to our target depth, so we halted drilling. Finally the grinding has stopped. Tomorrow I descend with the rest of Team 1.
321-2149: Initial readings of the atmosphere in the void are mixed. The atmosphere will not sustain life, but it is also not toxic. I’ll capture again once we reach the void in the MarkChute™.
322-2149: It is dark here. The only light this far beneath the toxic surface of Morning Star is the light we bring with us. The team has spread out to search the void. No signs of life.
322-2149: I don’t know exactly how to explain this, we have found the remains of something down here. Structures, not natural structures. Places where things could have lived…still no signs of life. But I did find something odd, a wet drive, a memory stick, an old disk, a IntelliDiary™ of some sort? I don’t know. We have agreed to bring it back to the TerraPod™ for analysis.
325-2149: I’m still exhausted from my venture down into the void. Everyone from Team 1 seems to feel the same way. The people that stayed in the TerraPod™ are fine, but those of us that went down have barely left bed in almost three days. I’m forcing myself up because one of the engineers found out how to extract the data from the disk I found. They said they matched the language to an ancient language, ancient even by Earth standards. I’m not sure what that means.
325-2149: It’s a Vid™! No one told me that! A Vid™ of a woman, a human woman, or at least that’s what she appears to be. In her 40s, speaking in an ancient tongue that stopped being spoken on Earth well before the Miocene Epoch. Her hair is brown, her eyes are sunken and brown, her skin looks tired, but I can tell that at one time she was probably considered beautiful. The translation process is painfully slow, and they have to keep rewinding the Vid™ to play it again to capture the dialect she is using. How could a human Vid™ be left on Morning Star? Event 2 Command had told us that no one had ever been to Morning Star. The technology seemed so old, could Earthwalkers have made it to Morning Star and forgotten? Or was this part of a larger conspiracy that was never meant to be discovered?
327-2149: They have translated the entire video. I don’t know how to relay its message to you, so I will capture it here in its entirety:
Please help us; if by the time you receive this message there is still any hope for us. We did not understand what we were doing. It wasn’t until it was too late that we realized we had made grave mistakes. The atmosphere has become toxic and forced us underground. We are slowly dying, the air here is becoming unsustainable. Our last chance is to break free of the atmosphere and attempt transit to Earth. Earth’s surface remains untouched, unscarred by our greed. It will give us a fresh start if we survive, a new beginning. A chance to learn from our mistakes here on Venus. Wish us hope!
We were already here!?! Humans had already lived on Morning Star, or Venus as they called it! Then destroyed it and traveled to Earth only to destroy that also? Human devastation caused them both. Who are we? Or more appropriately what are we? Habitual planet destroyers? Serial environment killers? How can we not stop ourselves? How can we not learn from our past mistakes? How many worlds will our species bring to ruin?
330-2149: All work has halted since the translation of the Vid™. Many have already sent themselves out, not wanting to participate in the closed loop of destruction any longer. I cannot bring myself to eat. The work we were sent here to accomplish…what use is it now? Knowing that if we are successful in re-terraforming Venus we will only bring destruction back upon the planet in the future. It’s pointless.
332-2149: The coating system has failed. The hull of the TerraPod™ will be breached in a matter of hours. This will be my last entry. I’m sorry Père, we have all failed.