Moon Disaster

The trip to Jupiter's moon.

Mission control had only some vision and documentation of what was required to prepare the transportation pods as well as the people as it happened two hundred and seventy-six years ago. They also had to rely on vision and documents of the processes needed to rehabilitate the people from their two hundred year hyper sleep in the eggshell pods.
I was undergoing a strict diet and training program with the rest of my sleeping companions when I got a message from the Happy Valley Community pod, informing me that my adopted mother had died in her sleep last night.
It said she was happy and well when she went to bed but as she was one hundred and four years old her body may have just shut down. I felt sad and know just how much she would be missed there as well as all her readers, she went out in style, just passed say in her sleep, no pain or illness, that's the way I would like to go.
The time to leave the only planet that I have known was drawing near; mission control had sent all the information to the technical people on Jupiter's moon so they will be able to advise the people that will be borne in the future.
I felt uneasy getting into the eggshell pod as this could be the end of my life, but my training and desire to do this strange thing pushed my foreword, I settled in, had my eyes and mouth glued shut, an air tube glued to my throat and the feeding and medication tube fitted to my navel, then I felt the warm bubbly gel start to make me rise from the bottom of the eggshell container, the lit was shut and soon I was asleep.
The next thing I felt burning pain all over my body and my eyes being unglued, I was in a warm water cylinder with swirling jets of water massaging my whole body.
My mouth was then unglued and I tried to scream but no noise came from my mouth, three robots were working on me, next thing one of them poured a warm sticky liquid into my mouth then I passed out.
I went through three months of intense rehabilitation before I could walk, it took another two months before my mind was able to function properly and I was considered by the team of robots to be fit to be released.
I was then taken to the moons pod headquarters where I met up with the rest of my travelling companions who had recovered from their ordeal faster than me, there I was informed that two of them couldn't be revived, so indeed to try to make a second trip back would be perilous.

We were then shown a vision of the moon and its population which was recently taken from a satellite, I had seen some vision taken two hundred years ago but this place has gone through a population explosion.
Apart from the two community headquarter pods, everyone here lives in a continuous band stretching around the habitable zone, they are now struggling to feed their population and many die from malnutrition.
The people transportation pods hovered above waiting to take the chosen people to the planet we just came from, the people will need to be young and in good health to have the best chance of survival.
I ventured outside the headquarters and was amazed to see this enormous orange planet, it was an optical illusion, Jupiter was so large that I felt that I could reach up and touch it though it was far away.
One day here was fifty-six hours and there were only four hours of darkness each night.
The air here smelt sweet but as the gravity was greater than my planet, getting around was more difficult.
My travelling companions then got to work with the trained team from the pod's headquarters to select and make ready the people for their transportation.

I was given two guides to take me out into the population to see the way they lived in this overcrowded and different place, I couldn't wait to continue my story. As I travelled throughout these communities, I first noticed the majority of the people were children, very few old people and they were all of a similar race and all dressed in bags that they made.
Hundreds of years of breeding had created this race so evolution and natural selection had created this race to survive here.
The people were uneducated and lived in makeshift huts around streams, they lived on poor grain crops, potatoes and corn.
All the salmon that their ancestors bred and released into the streams had been fished out fifty years ago or more, these people had just had to make the most of what they had and fend for themselves.
It was incredible sleeping at night underneath this amazingly different starry sky which had an orange glow from Jupiter, the gas giant, there were thousands of shooting stars and each brief night was a travelling picture show.I spent time each day telling these almost primitive people my stories and gathering theirs, I did not tell them anything of their selection for a journey to my planet as I had to leave that task to the team at the moons headquarters.
This was a strange and at times beautiful place with snow-capped mountains on one side and dry raging hot deserts on the other, the habitable zone was at times filled with lush vegetation where it hadn't been cleared, there were many crystal clear streams and lakes, I can see that this must have been a paradise for the first people to live here and can understand their population explosion.

After spending almost six months travelling around visiting many communities I returned to headquarters where I was called on to assist in preparing the selected people for the trip to their new home.
My role was to console the people who were terrified of the thought of such a trip, I had gained the trust of most of them as they were aware that I had made the trip safely and heard of my stories from other communities around this place.
I told them of a large planet almost eighty times the size of this moon, a place that our ancestors from earth settled almost five hundred years ago, on this planet, there is plenty of food to eat and no overcrowding.
In most cases, it worked but some people were not able to cope with the situation and were sent back to their communities.
Things were progressing slowly as these simple people had to be handled carefully, it took a long time sorting them from their many communities scattered all around the moon then bringing them back here to be prepared for the trip.
One by one we had the precious cargo packed into their eggshell cocoons then each pod was sent on its way, sometimes four months apart. It took over seven years to transport all the suitable and willing people to their new home and I kept thinking of them and hoped that they would be ok, I will never know as I will be long gone before they get to my old home planet.

Once all of the people here had left we still had three hundred and thirty thousand transportation pods leftover, it was decided to convert ten thousand of them into community living pods and space them all around the moon.
We then gathered up all the people who wished to live in these pods but the task was surprisingly difficult as they only knew one way of living, even though they had seen the headquarters pods, they felt that they didn't belong in such a place.
Our future role here was to educate the children then as the population grows high, transport them to the New World planet.
With the population here greatly reduced it was easy to grow enough food for everyone so their health gradually grew, the people were happier and quickly accepted their new way of life.
I continued to communicate with the people at mission control in the New World, they told me that the population was steadily rising and all here is well. The people that I communicate with have read all my stories and I was just told of an amazing discovery, a team of researchers had discovered from the seaweed samples I had gathered up on the remote island there with my colleagues. Then spent many years trying to grow it as its nutritional value was a must for us, a special submarine pod was built to plant sections deep in volcanic crevices in the ocean.
The seaweed grew slowly at first then Hugh seed pods appeared these pods were bean-shaped and over twelve feet long. The researchers harvested them and discovered they held a milk-like substance they called the elixir of life, it could cure people of all types of illnesses, the skin of these seed pods made an excellent leather product and the seed when cut into thin slices and cooked was delicious. I thought it was amazing, that precious seaweed was the reason that those alien creatures had existed on that tiny island for millions of years until we brought about their demise.

I then tried many times without success to contact the people left on earth, so I think any future of the earth's population will come from space. The Mars settlement sent an urgent message to the moon headquarters saying that they were in trouble a terrible storm had been raging for more than two weeks and had destroyed all the outstations as well as their hydroponic gardens which they relied on. The MAG motors had sucked in too much dust which was mostly puma's stone, it has caused the motors to malfunction and we don't have the skills to repair them.
Our headquarters leader suggested that they evacuate that place and join the Jupiter moon community, well they said we would love to but how can we do that?
Our leader then told them of the transportation pods he held in reserve, we can refit one to bring you all here; you are not that far away so you won't have to go into hyper sleep as the others did.
We soon had the small team of scientists, astronomers and geologists from Mars arrive to meet us it was great for me to meet them face to face, as I had many conversations with them over the past ten years.
They told us that after five hundred years we did not have anything to research on Mars so it was a blessing that storm resulted in us being here, we would have just died on that harsh barren planet.
Here we have a lot of things to research and discover as well as a beautiful place to see out our days, I agreed with them and felt the same, it has been one hell of a ride being the storyteller in these amazing times.

Read Part 15          The astronomy pod

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