The Other Path

The Mission.

Chapter One

 100 YEARS AFTER THE FALL. 

The Mission.

Not many people had volunteered for this mission.

Usually, off-world missions had an overwhelming amount of applications. But this one was different. It hit so close to home that a majority of the Operatives from the InterTravel Bureau had immediately started a rally to cancel the expedition before the decision had even been finalized. 

It was wrong, they said. We shouldn’t go near it, ever again. Hadn’t we caused enough trouble to begin with?

They had a good argument, with a solid background; it was a part of our history we would never allow ourselves to forget.

Our Great Shame. After all, it wasn’t every day an expedition to terraform and repopulate such a planet became an option. Most of all when that planet's name was Earth.

I was one of the first to volunteer. My life’s study had been on the Mother Planet we had destroyed and abandoned, left to rot in a solar system that hadn’t been touched for hundreds of years.

At twenty five, I was one of the youngest to be accepted. To be honest, I hadn’t expected to be chosen. I was an expert in my field, but by no means the most prominent or intellectual. I had chosen to be a Historian as my Primary because I wanted to be, not through Genetic Disposition. By Disposition, I was supposed to have been a Saifu, a practitioner of martial medicine. Although I did practice the Sai, it was not my Calling.

The work of a Historian had Called to me at a very young age. And having grown up in a time where our people were undergoing a structural upheaval, The Calling was becoming largely accepted. By the time I turned twelve, the days of compulsory Disposition Allocation were long gone. It was still expected you would practise your Disposition as a Secondary, however, and as most people – being naturally inclined to their Disposition by genetics – used their Secondary for recreation, it was common.

It had been one cycle since I was informed of my acceptance. And now, sitting on my bunk in the sparse room allocated to me on the O-I-4031 Orbiter, I was finally Earth-bound.

I had said goodbye to my family a seventh before my departure. My mother had cried, had held me tight. My father had smiled his soft, silent smile that told me in a thousand words that which he could never speak aloud.

My baby sister had blinked up at me. At five turnings, she was old enough to understand I was leaving, yet not old enough to grasp I would not be returning until she was much, much older.

We each had a Communigraph, and I would contact them every cycle. My mother gave me her necklace, with the music box charm I had adored as a child.

I did not cry. The last I saw of my family was my little sister raising her hand in an innocent gesture of goodbye.

My first view of Earth came several days later. I was standing at the window in my cabin, gazing at the stars and spotting constellations I had spent my life memorizing, when the first speck of colour entered my field of vision. I had read about it in books and seen sketches in the course of my research. But no sketch or description in the universe could have prepared me for this. Dead. That was the first word that came into my head when I first saw our Lost Planet. It had been tainted and poisoned by our ancestor’s hands. By their greed and misuse, their blatant neglect and abuse of one of the most beautifully balanced, bountiful planets to ever have been described.