The Sapphire Pass: All-Father

Future Tense

James looked in the mirror at his transformation. It wasn't often he got to change his appearance and go about secret little missions he made up for himself. In fact, he hadn't done it since his mother was still around.

He pulled on the brown wig, and put in the dark contacts, adding some freckles to the prosthetics already on his face. Then he signed the right papers, and headed on his way to the bottom floor of the training center. When gave them his papers and fake name, his most trusted advisor didn't even realize it was him and waved him through without a second glance.

He stood behind the four others in line, waited as the portal opened and walked through just as they did. It was his first time passing and he didn't exactly know what to expect, or what he would find once he made it to the other side.

As the bright light faded, and the blur subsided, he took his first look into the future. He had his papers and there were a large crates waiting for them. They were full of white powder bricks, packed and pressed with several tons of pressure then sent back through to him. It was more than enough to sustain and entire mega-city of nothing but Jelumme. Then there were the crystal seeds themselves.

Soon he would be setting the seeds to germinate in the vast salt-waters of the planet and in a single short decade he would have entire forests of them all over the planet, and he would start work on his mother's master plan. Sending out a deep space call to his original home planet and telling them of this one. By the time they arrived, their stock would be more than enough for all of the remaining Jelumme on his planet.

According to his mother that was why he was here, to save their own people. They need salt-water for germination and when she left, they had just culled the population to gain an extra generation's worth of The White. Her younger sisters, brother and father were among them. Nearly 1/3 of the worlds population were killed in order to give others a chance.

She was one of the 'rebels' on her planet who thought that they should find the first planet that was hospitable enough to sustain life and grow that which they relied on to live. She didn't care whether it already had life on it or not. She was also bitter at the government and willing to destroy other's lives and take over this world, just so she could one day call the remaining Jelumme to justify her actions and prove them all wrong.

Their own planet once ran with large fresh water rivers, and nearly 80% was covered with vast oceans of salt water. Bad planning on the part of the ruling powers had under estimated the amount of resources it would take to supply an entire world's population.

The original planet they found the crystals on was a frozen planet and the trees lived deep beneath the surface. They needed to be flooded with salt-water twice a year minimum to survive and kept submerged in it for several years until it could thrive. It was possible for a single tree to provide more than enough white for a single family of five to live on if it was used properly and refined, but by the time they figured out how to refine it well enough their oceans were nearly dry and largely turned into vast deserts. They first attempted to put laws in place to stop the population from it's continued expansion, and when that didn't solve their problem they started holding the lotteries.

James once asked her why they didn't just go back to the original planet and grow them their and bring back the powders they needed and she said, with the ever shrinking population there weren't enough workers to bring back enough. So, he asked why they didn't move, and to that she told him, there weren't enough ships to take them all and the planet's surface was too cold for Jelumme to survive for long. Even when they had done their excavations several people had died and lost limbs from cold death, which was the term they used for frostbite.

He had the same idea once. Take water from this world back to his planet considering they had nearly endless amounts of stable labor, and they could always make more if he needed it. However, when he met with the best mathematicians they explained that despite the fact they could move great quantities of water it would be much too little to sustain an entire population. Also, though heavy water only weighed ten percent more than fresh water, when carrying more than one thousand gallons it added up to a lot, and they'd never be able to get the amount required off the ground.