The Greatest Commodity (First Draft)

Andromeda

They had traveled so far. Far enough that the time mattered more than the distance. Leaving their galaxy for another. Millions of years as a trip.

The planet now loomed in the windows of the starship. The Classical Human crew couldn't help but feel they had gone nowhere, this planet was a chilly one, a bundle of clouds like the one they'd left behind a million years before.

A tall crewman with a bald head passed drinks out to the assembled crew and colonists.

The lights in the lounge room were off. Everything was dimly lit by the reflected light of the planet ahead, M31-Beta-5889D, the shadows were long; and so were the faces of the people.

One of the colonists, a tall man with purple skin and intricate patterns of yellow lines tattooed over, asked. "remind me why we left one cold and gloomy world for another?"

Another colonist replied. "It was warm and tropical in the pictures."

The colonists began to mutter amongst themselves as to the reasons for this. The conversation gradually began to dissolve into conspiracy theories, one of the colonists even accusing the Android knowledge-seekers who charted the area of lying to them and providing false information.

The captain protested this. "Now, hold on!"

Everyone looked toward the captain. But her position of authority distanced her from the rest of the ship's personnel, she was born of the upper classes, her unique status-tattoo showed this. Their society was a hierarchical one, and the lower classes resented the upper; it was for this reason that most of the colonists were of the lower classes. They disliked their upper-class captain.

She cleared her throat. "Those pictures were taken several million years ago. Anything could change in that amount of time."

"Like what?" A surly looking colonist shouted. "What are the odds that this planet just happened to drastically change over just a few million years?"

"Quite high, actually." The captain replied. "The description of this planet described it as having high volcanic activity. Any sufficiently large outburst would fill the atmosphere with ash and lower the global temperatures significantly."

This seemed to satisfy the majority of the lot, though a few continued to grumble afterward.

The little viewing party had ended hours before, and now they were coming in for a landing. Their heat-resistant Hull took no stress from atmospheric entry and the descent went uneventfully.

"We came all this way." Remarked a colonist, Kessick Arnes. "To feel like we never left at all." The skies were a depressing gray. Everything was covered in a layer of dew. The flora and fauna were somewhat alien, but still quite familiar.

"Hey." replied his fellow colonist and close friend, Jori Lemn. "At least we're no longer enslaved by the elite."

"You sure about that?" Kessick pointed towards the captain.

"Her? She's a rebel. She spent all her money to fund this voyage. She's as broke as we are."

"Still, she might try to take power over our colony."

"With what? She only commands the ship. None of us would willingly carry out any orders she'd want to give regarding the colony."

Conversation ceased as the two absorbed the surroundings. Odd noises that sounded like birdcalls, wind whistling through the tree-like megaflora. The 'leaves' fluttered wildly in the wind gusts. And the air was filled with flying creatures, resembling gnats, numerous scientists were already catching them in jars. The ground was rocky and damp, with the 'trees' pushing up through the rock, leaving a pile of shredded boulders surrounding the trunk. The skies were cloudy, and the fog was so thick that visibility was reduced to a few hundred meters on average. This was a damp and dull world.

"Hey!" Someone called. "We could use some help over here!"

Kessick and Lemn quickly ran towards the source of the call. Several colonists were busy erecting the colony itself, carrying huge prefab structures -- they were lightweight for their size but still heavy. The two colonists joined the group and helped to lift a housing unit from the cargo wagon onto a foundation that had been poured into a mold just minutes before and was already solid to the core.

"These solar panels are going to be next to useless!" One of them groaned.

"We're going to use the backup reactor from the ship." The captain said, standing several meters away and not helping, much to the annoyance of the colonists.

"And you're gonna carry it!" One of the colonists said angrily. The captain pretended to ignore her remark. She only got angrier at the lack of a response. "Damn aristocrats!" She grumbled. "We should've airlocked her while we had a chance." The captain merely turned her back and walked back to the ship. This angered the colonist enough that she gripped the prefab unit so hard her knuckles whitened.

The night was falling now, which took a while to do as the planet had a hundred-hour day. The sunset was completely invisible, resulting in a slowly darkening twilight. This world was even gloomier than the one they'd left, which at least had a twenty-five hour day and at least some sun. And they couldn't go back either. Millions of years had passed already in the time of passage, and home would be unrecognizable now.

The colonists moved into their prefab homes and bunked for the night, a night nearly twice as long as their entire day-night cycle back home.

Already the darkening world was making up for its lack of light, with an abundance of sound. The bird calls were replaced by odd chirping and croaking, the wind blew and rustled the leaves. Luckily the colonists weren't too disturbed by this as their habitats were of high quality, equal in design to standard residential constructs on any world. The sound-proofing layers of insulation worked reasonably well. But the noises of nature could still be heard -- which really said something about how loud it was outdoors.

Kessick rolled uneasily in his bed. A layer of foam atop a plastic shelf. His bed was not uncomfortable, other things kept him awake -- namely that damned noise! He had only been on this world for ten hours. And unless there were any other habitable planets within a thousand years of here, he would have to stay here the rest of his life.

He thought about many things as he lay fitfully on his bed of foam. Things like; why did his homeworld of Hestia never adopt the metric time system? Why did he and his fellow Hestians always speak of 'years' instead of Gigaseconds? Or why did they never actually swear an oath of allegiance to the Collective? It was luck that the Collective had not required it to keep them alive, but it would have spared them discomfort in the harder years to have sworn such an oath. Why had he signed up for this, most importantly, why did he choose to leave home for an uncertain future? His family had urged him to, they said it was best for him to leave the aristocracy-infected world they lived on; but life had never really been all that bad under the aristocracy, not great, perhaps, but not bad. And why didn't they go with him? He couldn't help but theorize that they must have sent him away because they didn't like him; why else would they not go with him when the passage was so affordable? It was a big ship, there was still room left over when they finally shipped out.

Even worse for him, he had nothing to do but think. There were no radio or holovision programs for him to watch or listen to, just recorded videos on his tablet that he'd seen enough times to be even more bored by watching them than by doing nothing at all.

He dug into his bag and found a cat magazine. Which he read for the articles given that he wasn't in much of a mood. It is a painful situation to be so bored as to read a cat magazine instead of just looking. Evidently, nobody had actually thought anyone would read it in any density anyway, so the magazine only lasted a few minutes. Kessick was terribly bored again.

"I don't like this very much." He mumbled as he began to fall asleep, finally.

The night lasted for several more day-lengths by the home standard. During which nobody went outside because of the intolerable noise and potential danger in the wildlife, there could be predators. Someone eventually did start broadcasting random video collections off of their tablet over the holovision of all the different colonists. Though most of the videos were dull documentaries of dull things, along with episodes of homemade dramas created by the colonist's children when they were young. Nobody cared, just having something to look at other than the wall was good enough! To be fair, though, many soon found themselves engrossed in the plot.