PROMPT: After several generations of living on a spacecraft, they finally arrived at the earth-duplicate planet that harbors intelligent life
This one went a completely different direction than I think the prompt's author was intending...
The news came in just after breakfast, but management decided to sit on it until dinner time. Trying to work out how to frame it, I guess; working through the contingencies.
In the middle of the afternoon, a new entry appeared on everyone’s calendar: All hands, in the central cafeteria at the main site; remote sites to teleconference in; no exceptions.
We weren’t really big on all-hands, or meetings of any kind bigger than the immediate team doing the work at hand; this gig was more or less pure execution from start to finish. We’d been dropped on the planet with ten thousand people, five years, and all the heavy equipment we could use, along with blueprints for four cities and assorted industrial sites.
The idea was, five years after we dropped, the colonization ships would start arriving, and we’d want to have housing and workplaces and basic food-and-sanitation infrastructure in place so that the million or so people frozen and stored on each of the big ships would be able to spend a week or so waking up and then be able to get right to work.
This wasn’t the first world Humanity had colonized, or even the hundredth; most of the wrinkles in the system had been ironed out before I was born. The tech for doing this stuff was mature; the personnel hierarchies were well-understood; the whole thing was well-planned to an extent that people who were not on the outer edge of Humanity’s expansion into the stars often found stultifying and dull, because most people have no idea how fast systemic failures can kill you and how truly isolated you are when it takes years to send a ‘help’ message and longer for a response.
So a surprise meeting was really a surprise.
I was attached to STL Construction and Heavy Engineering (‘Sky’s The Limit!’), which was an old-ish firm, medium sized, big enough not to be fully committed by its presence on this job but small enough to hold only minor contracts on a single site: Individual housing units, site-prep for a couple of larger projects, and, somehow, locks and security systems for the entire Beta City installation.
Arriving at the all-hands area in the as-yet unnamed central square in Beta City, I could see a bunch of others in STL yellow; different companies ended up sticking together, socially, but there wasn’t any kind of rule about it, it just happened that way.
The square was sited such that someone could stand on a raised area in the north-east corner and speak to the crowd; the acoustics were reasonably good and there was a gentle slope that allowed people to see the speaker over the head of the person in front of them.
There were holo projectors built into the stand, so that someone could speak remotely, or so that a speaker could call some supporting something into being in the air around them; and lastly, the projectors lining the north and east sides of the square allowed the entire space to virtually line up with similar spaces in Alpha, Delta, and Gamma cities, forming a big rectangle with the speaker’s dais in the center.
Right now there was a light-shimmer in the dais that indicated that there was a speaker in the dais at one of the sites -- probably Alpha -- but that they weren’t ready to speak yet. I found a spot to sit down and spent some time running through the reports of the day’s work; I usually ran through this stuff during dinner in preparation for evening planning sessions, but what the hell, this was as good a time as any.
After a while, there was a subtle shift in ambient noise which gave the impression of an open mic, of someone poised to speak; everybody in the crowd looked up toward the speaker’s dais. The blur of light resolved itself into the form of Gary Femmet, the overall project lead. He was shuffling what looked like actual papers at the podium.
After he got bored with paper-shuffling, he sighed, audible to everyone in any of the big squares, and looked up, face serious and set.
“Details are hard to come by,” he said, “And are still arriving, even as I stand here; but it appears that the colony ships on their way here were attacked something more than seventy-two hours ago and destroyed. Telemetry from the ships was being relayed along in a constant stream, so there’s a pretty clear picture of what happened...”
Above Gary’s head, images of the convoy of big, round ships crawled along; some sort of forced-perspective trick or just a straightforward visual lie put them in close enough proximity to be seen as a coherent group against the background of stars.
Suddenly, something incredibly fast happened to the lead ship, and then to the others almost simultaneously: an impression of a sweeping upper-left-to-lower-right motion, and then venting gasses and actual flames as gaping holes appeared in the hulls.
Just at the edge of the image, something dark and sinister-looking passed through the frame: Long and narrow and sharp looking, it could only be a ship, but not one I or anyone else here recognized.
As the great ships continued to belch atmosphere above him, Gary took a deep breath. “The attackers, whose identity is unknown, left no message and gave no indication of their reason for committing these acts.
“And that’s really all we know, at the moment. This understandably affects schedules and priorities, but it’s not clear yet exactly what those affects will be; for tonight, evening planning sessions are canceled, and work is on hold for the rest of the week.
“Many of you will have had friends or family with the fleet; please take the opportunity to speak with a counselor at your earliest convenience.
“Now is a time,” Gary said, looking up and giving a good go at meeting every eye, “When we must all support one another. Please be safe.”
And with that, the meeting was over. A buzz from my wristwatch told me that some relatively major change had happened to my calendar; standing in the midst of over a thousand other people all receiving the same update, I could feel the change buzz through the very ground. We all looked around at each other, and at our wrists; and then we went to find dinner.
The news came in just after breakfast, but management decided to sit on it until dinner time. Trying to work out how to frame it, I guess; working through the contingencies.
In the middle of the afternoon, a new entry appeared on everyone’s calendar: All hands, in the central cafeteria at the main site; remote sites to teleconference in; no exceptions.
We weren’t really big on all-hands, or meetings of any kind bigger than the immediate team doing the work at hand; this gig was more or less pure execution from start to finish. We’d been dropped on the planet with ten thousand people, five years, and all the heavy equipment we could use, along with blueprints for four cities and assorted industrial sites.
The idea was, five years after we dropped, the colonization ships would start arriving, and we’d want to have housing and workplaces and basic food-and-sanitation infrastructure in place so that the million or so people frozen and stored on each of the big ships would be able to spend a week or so waking up and then be able to get right to work.
This wasn’t the first world Humanity had colonized, or even the hundredth; most of the wrinkles in the system had been ironed out before I was born. The tech for doing this stuff was mature; the personnel hierarchies were well-understood; the whole thing was well-planned to an extent that people who were not on the outer edge of Humanity’s expansion into the stars often found stultifying and dull, because most people have no idea how fast systemic failures can kill you and how truly isolated you are when it takes years to send a ‘help’ message and longer for a response.
So a surprise meeting was really a surprise.
I was attached to STL Construction and Heavy Engineering (‘Sky’s The Limit!’), which was an old-ish firm, medium sized, big enough not to be fully committed by its presence on this job but small enough to hold only minor contracts on a single site: Individual housing units, site-prep for a couple of larger projects, and, somehow, locks and security systems for the entire Beta City installation.
Arriving at the all-hands area in the as-yet unnamed central square in Beta City, I could see a bunch of others in STL yellow; different companies ended up sticking together, socially, but there wasn’t any kind of rule about it, it just happened that way.
The square was sited such that someone could stand on a raised area in the north-east corner and speak to the crowd; the acoustics were reasonably good and there was a gentle slope that allowed people to see the speaker over the head of the person in front of them.
There were holo projectors built into the stand, so that someone could speak remotely, or so that a speaker could call some supporting something into being in the air around them; and lastly, the projectors lining the north and east sides of the square allowed the entire space to virtually line up with similar spaces in Alpha, Delta, and Gamma cities, forming a big rectangle with the speaker’s dais in the center.
Right now there was a light-shimmer in the dais that indicated that there was a speaker in the dais at one of the sites -- probably Alpha -- but that they weren’t ready to speak yet. I found a spot to sit down and spent some time running through the reports of the day’s work; I usually ran through this stuff during dinner in preparation for evening planning sessions, but what the hell, this was as good a time as any.
After a while, there was a subtle shift in ambient noise which gave the impression of an open mic, of someone poised to speak; everybody in the crowd looked up toward the speaker’s dais. The blur of light resolved itself into the form of Gary Femmet, the overall project lead. He was shuffling what looked like actual papers at the podium.
After he got bored with paper-shuffling, he sighed, audible to everyone in any of the big squares, and looked up, face serious and set.
“Details are hard to come by,” he said, “And are still arriving, even as I stand here; but it appears that the colony ships on their way here were attacked something more than seventy-two hours ago and destroyed. Telemetry from the ships was being relayed along in a constant stream, so there’s a pretty clear picture of what happened...”
Above Gary’s head, images of the convoy of big, round ships crawled along; some sort of forced-perspective trick or just a straightforward visual lie put them in close enough proximity to be seen as a coherent group against the background of stars.
Suddenly, something incredibly fast happened to the lead ship, and then to the others almost simultaneously: an impression of a sweeping upper-left-to-lower-right motion, and then venting gasses and actual flames as gaping holes appeared in the hulls.
Just at the edge of the image, something dark and sinister-looking passed through the frame: Long and narrow and sharp looking, it could only be a ship, but not one I or anyone else here recognized.
As the great ships continued to belch atmosphere above him, Gary took a deep breath. “The attackers, whose identity is unknown, left no message and gave no indication of their reason for committing these acts.
“And that’s really all we know, at the moment. This understandably affects schedules and priorities, but it’s not clear yet exactly what those affects will be; for tonight, evening planning sessions are canceled, and work is on hold for the rest of the week.
“Many of you will have had friends or family with the fleet; please take the opportunity to speak with a counselor at your earliest convenience.
“Now is a time,” Gary said, looking up and giving a good go at meeting every eye, “When we must all support one another. Please be safe.”
And with that, the meeting was over. A buzz from my wristwatch told me that some relatively major change had happened to my calendar; standing in the midst of over a thousand other people all receiving the same update, I could feel the change buzz through the very ground. We all looked around at each other, and at our wrists; and then we went to find dinner.
This one went a completely different direction than I think the prompt's author was intending...
The news came in just after breakfast, but management decided to sit on it until dinner time. Trying to work out how to frame it, I guess; working through the contingencies.
In the middle of the afternoon, a new entry appeared on everyone’s calendar: All hands, in the central cafeteria at the main site; remote sites to teleconference in; no exceptions.
We weren’t really big on all-hands, or meetings of any kind bigger than the immediate team doing the work at hand; this gig was more or less pure execution from start to finish. We’d been dropped on the planet with ten thousand people, five years, and all the heavy equipment we could use, along with blueprints for four cities and assorted industrial sites.
The idea was, five years after we dropped, the colonization ships would start arriving, and we’d want to have housing and workplaces and basic food-and-sanitation infrastructure in place so that the million or so people frozen and stored on each of the big ships would be able to spend a week or so waking up and then be able to get right to work.
This wasn’t the first world Humanity had colonized, or even the hundredth; most of the wrinkles in the system had been ironed out before I was born. The tech for doing this stuff was mature; the personnel hierarchies were well-understood; the whole thing was well-planned to an extent that people who were not on the outer edge of Humanity’s expansion into the stars often found stultifying and dull, because most people have no idea how fast systemic failures can kill you and how truly isolated you are when it takes years to send a ‘help’ message and longer for a response.
So a surprise meeting was really a surprise.
I was attached to STL Construction and Heavy Engineering (‘Sky’s The Limit!’), which was an old-ish firm, medium sized, big enough not to be fully committed by its presence on this job but small enough to hold only minor contracts on a single site: Individual housing units, site-prep for a couple of larger projects, and, somehow, locks and security systems for the entire Beta City installation.
Arriving at the all-hands area in the as-yet unnamed central square in Beta City, I could see a bunch of others in STL yellow; different companies ended up sticking together, socially, but there wasn’t any kind of rule about it, it just happened that way.
The square was sited such that someone could stand on a raised area in the north-east corner and speak to the crowd; the acoustics were reasonably good and there was a gentle slope that allowed people to see the speaker over the head of the person in front of them.
There were holo projectors built into the stand, so that someone could speak remotely, or so that a speaker could call some supporting something into being in the air around them; and lastly, the projectors lining the north and east sides of the square allowed the entire space to virtually line up with similar spaces in Alpha, Delta, and Gamma cities, forming a big rectangle with the speaker’s dais in the center.
Right now there was a light-shimmer in the dais that indicated that there was a speaker in the dais at one of the sites -- probably Alpha -- but that they weren’t ready to speak yet. I found a spot to sit down and spent some time running through the reports of the day’s work; I usually ran through this stuff during dinner in preparation for evening planning sessions, but what the hell, this was as good a time as any.
After a while, there was a subtle shift in ambient noise which gave the impression of an open mic, of someone poised to speak; everybody in the crowd looked up toward the speaker’s dais. The blur of light resolved itself into the form of Gary Femmet, the overall project lead. He was shuffling what looked like actual papers at the podium.
After he got bored with paper-shuffling, he sighed, audible to everyone in any of the big squares, and looked up, face serious and set.
“Details are hard to come by,” he said, “And are still arriving, even as I stand here; but it appears that the colony ships on their way here were attacked something more than seventy-two hours ago and destroyed. Telemetry from the ships was being relayed along in a constant stream, so there’s a pretty clear picture of what happened...”
Above Gary’s head, images of the convoy of big, round ships crawled along; some sort of forced-perspective trick or just a straightforward visual lie put them in close enough proximity to be seen as a coherent group against the background of stars.
Suddenly, something incredibly fast happened to the lead ship, and then to the others almost simultaneously: an impression of a sweeping upper-left-to-lower-right motion, and then venting gasses and actual flames as gaping holes appeared in the hulls.
Just at the edge of the image, something dark and sinister-looking passed through the frame: Long and narrow and sharp looking, it could only be a ship, but not one I or anyone else here recognized.
As the great ships continued to belch atmosphere above him, Gary took a deep breath. “The attackers, whose identity is unknown, left no message and gave no indication of their reason for committing these acts.
“And that’s really all we know, at the moment. This understandably affects schedules and priorities, but it’s not clear yet exactly what those affects will be; for tonight, evening planning sessions are canceled, and work is on hold for the rest of the week.
“Many of you will have had friends or family with the fleet; please take the opportunity to speak with a counselor at your earliest convenience.
“Now is a time,” Gary said, looking up and giving a good go at meeting every eye, “When we must all support one another. Please be safe.”
And with that, the meeting was over. A buzz from my wristwatch told me that some relatively major change had happened to my calendar; standing in the midst of over a thousand other people all receiving the same update, I could feel the change buzz through the very ground. We all looked around at each other, and at our wrists; and then we went to find dinner.
The news came in just after breakfast, but management decided to sit on it until dinner time. Trying to work out how to frame it, I guess; working through the contingencies.
In the middle of the afternoon, a new entry appeared on everyone’s calendar: All hands, in the central cafeteria at the main site; remote sites to teleconference in; no exceptions.
We weren’t really big on all-hands, or meetings of any kind bigger than the immediate team doing the work at hand; this gig was more or less pure execution from start to finish. We’d been dropped on the planet with ten thousand people, five years, and all the heavy equipment we could use, along with blueprints for four cities and assorted industrial sites.
The idea was, five years after we dropped, the colonization ships would start arriving, and we’d want to have housing and workplaces and basic food-and-sanitation infrastructure in place so that the million or so people frozen and stored on each of the big ships would be able to spend a week or so waking up and then be able to get right to work.
This wasn’t the first world Humanity had colonized, or even the hundredth; most of the wrinkles in the system had been ironed out before I was born. The tech for doing this stuff was mature; the personnel hierarchies were well-understood; the whole thing was well-planned to an extent that people who were not on the outer edge of Humanity’s expansion into the stars often found stultifying and dull, because most people have no idea how fast systemic failures can kill you and how truly isolated you are when it takes years to send a ‘help’ message and longer for a response.
So a surprise meeting was really a surprise.
I was attached to STL Construction and Heavy Engineering (‘Sky’s The Limit!’), which was an old-ish firm, medium sized, big enough not to be fully committed by its presence on this job but small enough to hold only minor contracts on a single site: Individual housing units, site-prep for a couple of larger projects, and, somehow, locks and security systems for the entire Beta City installation.
Arriving at the all-hands area in the as-yet unnamed central square in Beta City, I could see a bunch of others in STL yellow; different companies ended up sticking together, socially, but there wasn’t any kind of rule about it, it just happened that way.
The square was sited such that someone could stand on a raised area in the north-east corner and speak to the crowd; the acoustics were reasonably good and there was a gentle slope that allowed people to see the speaker over the head of the person in front of them.
There were holo projectors built into the stand, so that someone could speak remotely, or so that a speaker could call some supporting something into being in the air around them; and lastly, the projectors lining the north and east sides of the square allowed the entire space to virtually line up with similar spaces in Alpha, Delta, and Gamma cities, forming a big rectangle with the speaker’s dais in the center.
Right now there was a light-shimmer in the dais that indicated that there was a speaker in the dais at one of the sites -- probably Alpha -- but that they weren’t ready to speak yet. I found a spot to sit down and spent some time running through the reports of the day’s work; I usually ran through this stuff during dinner in preparation for evening planning sessions, but what the hell, this was as good a time as any.
After a while, there was a subtle shift in ambient noise which gave the impression of an open mic, of someone poised to speak; everybody in the crowd looked up toward the speaker’s dais. The blur of light resolved itself into the form of Gary Femmet, the overall project lead. He was shuffling what looked like actual papers at the podium.
After he got bored with paper-shuffling, he sighed, audible to everyone in any of the big squares, and looked up, face serious and set.
“Details are hard to come by,” he said, “And are still arriving, even as I stand here; but it appears that the colony ships on their way here were attacked something more than seventy-two hours ago and destroyed. Telemetry from the ships was being relayed along in a constant stream, so there’s a pretty clear picture of what happened...”
Above Gary’s head, images of the convoy of big, round ships crawled along; some sort of forced-perspective trick or just a straightforward visual lie put them in close enough proximity to be seen as a coherent group against the background of stars.
Suddenly, something incredibly fast happened to the lead ship, and then to the others almost simultaneously: an impression of a sweeping upper-left-to-lower-right motion, and then venting gasses and actual flames as gaping holes appeared in the hulls.
Just at the edge of the image, something dark and sinister-looking passed through the frame: Long and narrow and sharp looking, it could only be a ship, but not one I or anyone else here recognized.
As the great ships continued to belch atmosphere above him, Gary took a deep breath. “The attackers, whose identity is unknown, left no message and gave no indication of their reason for committing these acts.
“And that’s really all we know, at the moment. This understandably affects schedules and priorities, but it’s not clear yet exactly what those affects will be; for tonight, evening planning sessions are canceled, and work is on hold for the rest of the week.
“Many of you will have had friends or family with the fleet; please take the opportunity to speak with a counselor at your earliest convenience.
“Now is a time,” Gary said, looking up and giving a good go at meeting every eye, “When we must all support one another. Please be safe.”
And with that, the meeting was over. A buzz from my wristwatch told me that some relatively major change had happened to my calendar; standing in the midst of over a thousand other people all receiving the same update, I could feel the change buzz through the very ground. We all looked around at each other, and at our wrists; and then we went to find dinner.
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