2520
Outside, the sun rose for the first time in sixteen days, or one droe. Deep inside his windowless quarters, Stowik woke up in darkness and stretched out his powerful limbs as he reoriented himself with his fully-grown body, so different from the five-year-old self in his dream. Trying to rid himself of the frightening fiery images that always ended his recurrent dream, he focused on his limited knowledge of Earth . He had never even seen a picture, but the Elders had told him bits and pieces when he refused to stop pestering. The Earth was massive, they said; it was over twice as big as their home, Titan. They told him it had huge masses of liquid water on the surface. The Elders said if you put all of the ethane lakes on Titan together they still wouldn’t even come close to filling one the oceans of Earth. Stowik asked if Earth had rings like Saturn, but even the Elders didn’t know. He wondered if it was still the same: after all, three hundred and eighty years was a long time. There’s nothing left, he reminded himself.
Stowik opened his eyes and took in his dim surroundings. His abnormally large pupils sucked up all the available light like a black hole. The stained ceiling hung low over his head. He reached up and absentmindedly rubbed the peeling flakes of plastic that hung off of the ceiling. They tore off and gently fluttered down to land beside Stowik’s reclined form. It’s all falling apart, isn’t it? He gently rubbed the patch of exposed ice underneath the peeled plastic wall-coating and let his arm fall back to his side. Time to start the day. He rolled over in his cot and looked across the room at the clock above his workstation’s dark grey tubing. With a groan, Stowik got to his feet.
Stowik lived in the Concrete, deep underground Alpha India where the ethane was pumped. He preferred it down there, with its seemingly never-ending rooms, so huge it seemed to Stowik that each was its own world dying to be explored. Except my own world is dying. He could spend days in the Concrete exploring the forgotten equipment and unused passages. Of course, that was before the Fire, when an Alpha Indianite could spare time for such things. Nevertheless, the grey tubing and dull plastic sheeting lining the walls were comforting, offering protection from the ice on all sides. Over the years, he had marked his trails but had never reached an end to the caverns. But there were more important things to do than explore the caverns of the Concrete—Stowik had sole responsibility of maintaining the ethane pumping system. No one but Stowik really knew how it worked, and he had only learned through years of trial and error. The Fire had destroyed all of the records and most of the infrastructure. The Fire also annihilated 99.9% of the citizens. Welcome to Alpha India, population fifty-one.
Stowik hobbled away from his bed, donned his thermal body suit, and checked the valves and dials at the console. The pressure had dropped another half a tick mark. They were running out of ethane in the aquifer. But why? For hundreds of years the aquifer had held constant. In the past several droes, the levels of ethane Alpha India had been pumping out had began to decline. Burning the hydrocarbon was their lifeline: without their only source of electricity, lighting the plants in the greenhouse would be impossible. They could go on for fifteen droes perhaps, but something had to be done.
Stowik walked past the plastic valves mounted on the winding dark gray tubing and grabbed some greenhouse-grown vegetables out of his refrigerator. Running low. Stowik started eating the greens as he ambled through several darkened rooms until a faint light illuminated the doorway. He walked through to see the colossal contraption of lights casting their glow onto a massive pit of soil. Numerous plants were spread out evenly across the loam, and Stowik could see that some bore their fruit. He eyed a long hose connected to the wall and attached it to the edge of the pit. In a few relaxed movements, Stowik was at the wall and turned the valve. The hose grew taut as water flowed through the tube and into a series of channels that redirected the water and irrigated the soil. Once the pit became saturated, Stowik shut off the valve and turned another valve. This one drew a hydrocarbon-nitrogen sludge from the man-made lake hundreds of meters above him and let it trickle through the hose. It oozed through the channels and found its place in the soil where it would supply nutrients to Stowik’s food source. Satisfied with his daily ritual, Stowik made his way to his workshop. Rockhead’s hopper calls.
Stowik’s brother Rockhead was in charge of exploration missions. Rockhead knew how Titan worked better than anyone. Where Stowik dealt with valves, gas flow, and engines, Rockhead dealt with fluid permeability through ice, aquifer stability, and weather cycles. Stowik had heard the Elders call his art “geology,” but what it came down to was that Rockhead knew the land. He could read it, and hopefully, he could help save Alpha India by figuring out what was depleting their aquifer of ethane.
Stowik was more technically inclined than Rockhead, preferring to take apart and build things. His responsibility in the Concrete required minimal work as long as he stayed on top of it, which offered him plenty of time to work on the hoppers. He was building one for Rockhead; with a hopper at his disposal, he could cover much more ground, and hopefully come up with a solution to their energy crisis. Stowik was also building a hopper for himself, but had yet to tell the Elders what he was doing. There are enough parts, and no one else knows what to do with them. There was a chance that the Elder’s wouldn’t approve of Stowik’s hoppers. He wanted to make sure they were fully operational when that time came.
Alpha India’s current mode of transportation was the rover: a machine which worked flawlessly with a combustion engine and ethane as the fuel, but was limited by the terrain. Alpha India was situated in a small crater, which in itself was located inside of a much larger impact crater. Building inside of a crater offered several advantages: the outer walls and foundations are already there. Once the inner structures are completed, debris from outside can be poured on top to offer insulation and radiation protection. Just as importantly, the colonists created an ethane lake on the crater platform that allowed them to siphon off nutrients to their greenhouses simply using gravity.
Building in craters only had one disadvantage: leaving. Alpha India’s surrounding crater rim crest was too steep to manage in one of their rovers. But Stowik’s hopper, a rocket-propelled vehicle that takes off and lands vertically and runs on abundant atmospheric methane, would solve that dilemma. There would be no bounds to where they could explore. And they had to. To survive.
Galaxy-wide human population: fifty-one.
Another half of a tick mark dropped.