Can this small group hike across unfamiliar places, a desert, jungle, swamp, and a sea, in a few weeks?
At the top of my calendar, a document my friends and I, Fiman, created with our smart phones, it was the year 21. I started thinking about a file, information that Onen, one of our robot guardians, had recently discovered aboard our spaceship. We were on a vessel that crash-landed near the edge of this desert oasis on a barren spot on a planet we called Somin. After searching the craft for several months, he located it.
According to the 30-year old file, the planet, Laiplen, was entering an ice age brought on by air pollution and asteroid dust. Dr. Upton’s team of Physicists along with a group of scientists placed fifteen men and fifteen women’s cloned DNA, my friends, including me, inside a micron sized spaceship. Then they injected the craft into a tiny black hole, a Planck-size aperture, a portal that remained open for a billionth of a second.
After several months, Dr. Upton’s team created 2500 holes, doors into parallel universes. Unfortunately, because most of the doors were unstable, they only injected 31 ships into 31 holes.
Dinen, the head of the President’s Accounting Office, an organization representing the entire planet, told Dr. Upton that sending the ships was a waste of time and money. He also stated that Dr. Upton and his team should have spent their time helping other Physicists, scientists who helped launch three two-hundred-foot long spacecraft.
In a meeting with Dr. Upton and Dinen, Dr. Hopely, the head of Global Physicists, an international organization consisting of 12,120 Physicists, told Dinen that Dr. Upton’s team knew more about quantum foam and micron sized black holes than anyone else on Laiplen. Nonetheless, Dinen kept complaining, saying that Dr. Upton’s plan would fail.
I looked up, curious. The early morning sky was clear, without a cloud. Close to the horizon, Alpha Centauri A, a sun-like star, the one our planet orbited, rose.
All of us had lived here for most of our twenty-two years. When everyone reached the age of sixteen, they began dating. Last summer, each couple moved into their own tent because they wanted more privacy.
I thought about our guardians, three four-foot-tall male humanoid robots, Onen, Dost and Tress, androids that helped us with many tasks.
Another topic crossed my mind. For several years, after building a telescope, Onen observed an asteroid, an ice-covered body that was headed for a nearby moon. Months ago, he told me that the asteroid, one he called Ya Ao, might strike Somin.
At the time, I shrugged it off.
