Mother
You pick me
up from the earthen cradle
A child of
millions, we suckle your tumbling breast
You carry
us through the void so feral
Our
slumbering heads, your solicitous chest
Oh, Mother…
Will we stay
as one forever?
Luna
Defense Alpha Tower stood high and perpetually aware for three millennia.
The sky it breached was ad infinitum in its void, as was the unmoving terrain
its shadow subjugated. The horizon: a line conjoining grey rock and black space,
embodied regions absent of light, and yet illuminated by a star incrementally
older, subtly hotter. The star’s transitory fires scarcely fractured the
morning face of a tedious sphere drifting distantly above the Tower’s spiraled
point. Tending to its patient, the Tower monitored the once miraculously
vibrant planet: Earth, now a collapsing shelter, out of breath and beaten and
seemingly hesitant to remain beside her moon; a world barely discernible
against the bareness of a void it had so effortlessly disregarded for eons; now
opaque like a smear of gray clouds where light’s diffusion into day and its
scattering by night were no longer distinguishable; now suffocated in the thick
miles of soot and dust and ice crystals that reject whatever enlightenment
approached its orbit. The Tower; it noted this behavior by acute measure of
discarded photons, magnetic turbulence, and hundreds of trillions of other
factors which wept from the planet’s endless ache. The Tower knew
instantaneously and at all times by its algorithmic foundations the creation
and spread and quantity of heat, magnetic field fluctuations, ionizing
radiation, hydrogen loss vs. hydrogen gain, pressure; and, of course, the
trillions upon trillions of Nan-viral activity and prolificacy as detected by
radio wave and automated sample readings…undetectable, as it has been for two
hundred and thirty seven years since the last quantifiable measurement. Still;
too early to initiate the Second Phase. Still too early.
Another 1055 years later, the Tower operated as it had all the
other years measuring the fits of roiling atmosphere and sudden dead stillness; monitored like a bedside physician the failing condition and yet another plummet towards obscurity for former Earth. To the Tower, the patient’s
behavior had changed drastically over the last hundred years in increments too
slow for evolution to respond. Yet, data received, data recorded, and data
consumed applied to yet another modified, yet working hypothesis in the Tower’s quantum data
banks.
By five millennia since The Spread, the Tower stood as it always
had before, though the working hypothesis had been adjusted a thousand
fold. And radically dissimilar in
appearance, a more opaque Earth rested on its side as it swayed, bloated by
oceans saturated with heat and heavy metals and brine, while its continents
shook in volcanic eruptions and whose foundations were undermined by the
oxidative and corrosive winds thrown by even more colossal storms.
And without interruption – without the constraint of time -- The Tower
observed and collected the residual wailing of a suicidal planet for another
three thousand and thirty two years, when one of the millions of Earth orbiting
satellites under the Tower’s control had vanished, unexpectedly. The Tower then
placed online an Earth landing shuttle. Preceding the launch, the Tower
initiated full life-support to reawaken one of the eight dozen Earth orbiting
tether ships, EDT-9. And onboard tether EDT-9 were powerful burdens from
another time whose influences were to be closely monitored, carefully utilized
and -- upon completion of tasks – immediately disengaged and either returned to
hibernation, or destroyed; either equal in its necessity.
The Tower was forever aware that life could only thrive where
Man slept eternally.
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