Kepler-22b

Prologue

I look curiously through a tiny hole in the blanket wrapped tightly around me. Fire bursts out of the light green sky, chaos is all around us. I am being swaddled and bounced by a tall woman that resembles myself, though she speaks a language I can't remember.

The woman cries, "Heilpode ru gelika frop tao!" Then I hear a high pitched alarm being sound, followed by several screams and then the women falls stiffly to the ground, dropping me harshly against the dirt, along with the rest of the population, and ending the chaos.

Once the thought that all is lost touched every corner of my still developing mind, a new thought takes hold of me. But it wasn't my own. The woman speaks her last words into my mind, no spoken words necessary. She desperately looks me in the eyes, "pru blikay." The thought was so soft that it was almost as if the women had whispered into my mind with her last dying breath. And although this is a language that I don't understand, I somehow just know what it translates to: 'last hope'.

Most of the details afterwards have since slipped from my mind. What I do recall is a man in a tall red ragged robe, covering all his features except for his wrinkled face, picking me up and carrying me over to a small metal pod concealed behind feet of vines and stones. The pod was small, it contained nothing but two seats and fresh air constantly running through the pipes along the edges of its gray walls. One of the seats was already occupied by a bundle of fine silk and wool blankets.

The cloaked figure kneels down and gently sets me inside next to the other bundle. He attaches a feeding tube to my mouth and it instantly sprays a gas onto my tongue that fills my head with a fog and the need to sleep.

Once he shuts the tiny sliding door, the pod lurches up into the sky. The force alone is enough to make me barf in the small amount of room I have in the pod. So much for fresh air.

Luckily though the mess disappears through a previously concealed tube in the floor panels and is sucked out of the pod.

I descend into the air and look down at the place I lived and called home (or would have called home if I could talk) for one short year. But then, I am hardly above the tip of the small mountain that was near my village, when something peculiar happens. The bodies of my people vanish into thin air. Along with the fire and buildings that once rested there, the civilization just disappears.

~~~~

I estimated that by the time my pod had landed on another surface, around two rotations of the sun had come and gone. Sometime after the pod ship landed, I woke up and noticed that I had finally reached the destination programed into the ship. I didn't know why but I felt this aching feeling in my stomach, normally when that occurred one of my tubes filled me with nourishment. I suppose now that I was on this new place I would have to leave the pod and find my own supplements that could keep these aches away.

I found that the pod door had already opened automatically and I got out to stretch my bent legs. When I tried to stand, I instantly fell on my face and into the grass that I had found myself in. I sat up and gazed around at this new place for any sign of civilization. I found none. Just nature.

This unknown land and I were all alone. A thought crossed my mind as my brain flashed back to the only other thing in the pod with me. I tilted my head back towards the craft. The bundle, the one I thought had been filled with supplies or medicines left by the hooded figure that rested in the tiny seat next to me, it was just a pile of blankets when I got to it.

There must be thousands of creatures on my new world waiting for me to be their next meal. Now that's comforting.