Creeptober Horror Spree: Volume One

The Day We Found God

We constructed The Ark in orbit. The vessel was too large to do anything else; there wasn't enough engine thrust in the world to get it out of Earth's atmosphere. Capable of housing five million people in stasis, the goal was to make it to the closest habitable Earth-like planet. As predicted, our carelessness had screwed our world six ways from Sunday. Theoretically, it would bounce back - but we succeeded in making it uninhabitable for our species. Predictably, the only people on board that aren't obscenely wealthy are the science crew and me. There are about five hundred thousand lucky ones that got on for free, but for the most part, The Ark is inhabited by the very people that caused our problems in the first place.

I have half a mind to shut off some of their life supports.

I can say that because I will be dead before they wake up. Someone has to be here to operate the systems and navigate the ship. It's too large to self-navigate safely; autopilot is a perfected system only in personal-sized vessels, and The Ark is the first and only of its kind and size. The rest of humanity is rotting to death two hundred light-years behind us; by now, the population is probably gone. I am an engineer. Growing up on a ship knowing your only purpose is to keep millions of psychopaths alive so they can go ruin another planet makes you pretty bitter.

Space is boring. We're instructed to document everything in journals, but, so far, we have a very long series written about nothing. We pass by Nebulas and other astronomical sights, I think, as my ancestors would pass by trees on the road. Once in a while, we note an anomaly, but we're not an exploration vessel. We log the coordinates for future curiosity and keep going. This week, however, the team is buzzing. We've found something impossible. We've found God. Now, I know. We're scientists, right? How can we even think this? There has to be a rational explanation, yes?

Well, there is. See, it's always been an unspoken truth: if God existed, he would undoubtedly be some kind of physical being. Most people, including myself, just couldn't suspend disbelief on the idea. The notion that an all-powerful being dug his easy bake oven out of the garage and whipped up the universe was absurd. This is why I can assure whoever reads this log that we did everything by the book before making this wild claim. We didn't even know it was a being initially; the thing is so huge, we had initially marked it down as the largest planetary debris chunk we'd ever seen.

More or less the size of a gas giant taught to me as Jupiter; we didn't realize we were sailing by a gargantuan animal until we saw an eyeball. Safely nestled beneath what appeared to be transparent chitin, it swung to The Ark as we passed. Multiple pupils with a strange star-like shape expanded and contracted. To say we were stunned is an understatement. Then, our reactions turned to fear. We were, after all, floating within a thousand miles of a bonafide cosmic horror. Except, it seemed benevolent. Curious. It watched us calmly and started to follow. Or maybe, instead, we were just going the same way.

Whichever the case, we found this discovery worthy of our finite and valuable stock of probes. It took us a while to warm up to the idea because it was one thing to take a sample from an asteroid and quite another to potentially hurt a creature that could crush us if it wanted to. We sent the probes cautiously, directing them to scrape samples gently. Only if that proved useless would we implement the drills. Thankfully, the scrapings did the trick. I was especially excited about Probe 7's findings. The being that was following us had long tendril-like appendages hanging off of it.

We witnessed the creature gently plunging these appendages through the atmosphere of a barren-looking planet. It didn't appear to destroy or take anything, so I was quite eager to see what kinds of cells or minerals were at the ends of the tendrils. The findings shocked us. To begin, the creature has cells that do not exist in any of our databases. Not only is it a new species, but it is also a brand new phylum. Since we discovered it, we spent much of our time trying to think of a name for it. It wasn't until the samples from Probe 7 finished analyzing that we knew what to call the creature.

Planet Seeder. At the time of this entry log, we are unsure if there are more of these beings, but we are excited to say we know what it's doing. Inside the tendrils are the basic building blocks of carbon-based life. Essentially, the Planet Seeder answers that age-old question. How did we get here? Some time ago, it (or one of its kind) floated by Earth and gave it the gift of life. We had found a living God. The Planet Seeder isn't quite what any given religion decided it would be, and I sincerely doubt it sent its only son to die for our sins, but it exists.

It traveled alongside us for fifty years.

Suddenly, it stopped. We didn't notice at first due to its size, but eventually, we saw the ship was outpacing the Planet Seeder. It focused its many eyes on us, surrounding The Ark with its tendrils. To be honest, I thought we were about to die. The problem with this vessel is that we are not permitted to go too far off course. While we can direct the ship around obstacles, the navigation system simply won't let us unless it detects something unavoidable. Ahead of us, save for the net of tendrils, was empty space—smooth sailing for probably two hundred years. Our children had grown up with the Planet Seeder peacefully escorting us across the universe, so the sudden aggression was all the scarier to them.

Yet, we quickly surmised it wasn't aggression at all. The Planet Seeder conveyed some emotions in its eyes. Over the years, we identified curiosity, boredom, and contentedness. As we moved farther away, more of it became easily visible, and its eyes...the Planet Seeder was afraid. Not for itself, I feel, but for us. The tendril net was not an act of aggression, but protection. I didn't know how to convey to the creature that we couldn't cut the engines, let alone go a different way. We braced for impact. The Ark was one of three ships, a contingency plan for a disaster such as a gigantic cosmic God accidentally squashing us. I had just been hoping we would survive.

However, once it became evident that we weren't stopping, the Planet Seeder let us go. We watched it in the rear feed for days, astounded by the size of it. Slowly, our awe turned to uneasiness. After four weeks, the entire creature was visible on the screen, and we could see it as a whole being.

Thick, enormous scars covered the Planet Seeder. Scars so big, whatever hurt it must have been three times its size, at least. An icy metallic taste hit my tongue as I realized why it stopped following us; why it looked afraid. We don't know what awaits us in this quadrant, but we hope it doesn't notice we're here.