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    The Forever Earth
    The Forever Earth
    The Forever Earth
    Ebook75 pages59 minutes

    The Forever Earth

    By David J. Lovato

    ()

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    About this ebook

    In the distant future, humanity has reached the apex of space travel, finding themselves alone in a dark and quiet solar system. Then the Navigators appear, a species of aliens capable of bringing mankind into a new frontier via teleportation.

    Cody is one of the first settlers to uproot his life and move to a space colony orbiting a habitable planet half a universe away. People from all walks of life make their way to the colonies, hoping to earn a shot at one day living on a new planet's surface.

    But half a universe isn't far enough to escape humanity's demons, and Cody and the rest of the colonists soon find themselves cut off from Earth, stranded in the silence of unfamiliar stars. Culture shock, separation anxiety, and lawlessness collide, and Cody's only hope for peace rests with his dreams of the little blue planet he left behind, and his ability to find his way back.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDavid J. Lovato
    Release dateMay 10, 2019
    ISBN9780463725078
    The Forever Earth
    Author

    David J. Lovato

    I live in Kansas City, where I spend most of my time reading, writing, or reading and writing.

    Read more from David J. Lovato

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      Book preview

      The Forever Earth - David J. Lovato

      The Forever Earth

      a novella by

      David J. Lovato

      Copyright © 2019 David J. Lovato

      Cover art © 2019 David J. Lovato

      All rights reserved.

      Table of Contents

      Night in the Garden of Eden

      Liftoff

      Immigrant Station

      The Starway

      Colony 136

      A Night Ride

      A Close Encounter

      An Artificial Evening

      Colony Life

      The Silence

      The Crash

      A Departure

      Going Home

      Afterword

      About the Author

      1

      Night in the Garden of Eden

      They said it would be paradise, but one man’s paradise is another man’s hell, and we’re all stuck here, now.

      It starts with the Navigators. What year did we find them? I don’t even remember. Actually, I think they found us. Imagine you’re on an island in the ocean, and every human lives on that same island, and no matter how many ships you send to sea, no one ever finds another land, let alone other people.

      One day a ship appears out of nowhere with a whole new species on it. That’s what it felt like. They just popped into existence in our orbit. That’s what they do, they teleport.

      So they pop in to say hello, and we do all that diplomatic mumbo-jumbo we planned way back when, which I guess is similar to how different nations used to greet each other, except with a lot more paperwork. We give them permission to land (as though we could stop them) but they don’t land, not really. They’re always floating, something about incompatible molecular structures. They can’t touch us or anything from our side of the Universe. They’ve always got this thin layer of their own atmosphere around them, they can do that.

      They can manipulate molecules is it, basically. That’s how they teleport. They take their molecules and then they take molecules anywhere else in the Universe, so long as they have an exact lock on it, and they tangle them up, make them the same for a fraction of a fraction of a second, and then they just cut the connection on the old one, and they’re billions of lightyears away. The Navigators can do this with other things, too, even re-arrange their very essence. Turn water into gold, or gold into shit.

      We were terrified in the beginning. I remember my grandmum telling me how scary it was back then. Everyone knew what the Navigators were capable of, but nobody knew what they wanted to actually do.

      Well, they went and made the big mistake of telling us their secret. Turns out they eat muons, which are a sub-atomic particle and some science-y whatnot. They basically soak in a solar ray for a while to restock their energy; I guess turning water into wine takes a lot more out of you than that old book shows.

      When they’ve got no energy, they’ve got no power. About as omnipotent as a newborn kitten. That’s when we grabbed them. Got a lot more like how nations used to greet each other then: Suddenly there was a Navigator brought aboard every starship as a guest. See, we already had the ships. Want to go to Pluto? You’ll be there in two days. For all the good it does you; there’s fuck-all on Pluto, and everywhere else we could get to. It would take lifetimes to get anywhere there might be life, not to mention how much food and water you’d have to put on that ship. So we gave up trying to find life, but we kept making the ships, because sometimes it’s nice to watch the sun rise on Io.

      Most of those ships already had the necessary parts. Take some wires here, a part of the inner hull there, and you can make a tube that keeps muons from getting to the Navigator inside. Feed him only enough to follow your orders, and the little bugger’s got no choice, if he ever wants to eat at all.

      Didn’t take long for the remaining Navigators to wise up and bugger off, but we had plenty by then. Now and then one might just teleport out of his tube, but they’re social creatures; he’d just pick up the quantum footprint of the nearest Navigator, teleport himself next to one of our ships, and get captured again. Eventually they stopped trying that, and then the whole wide Universe was ours for the taking. Puny little humanity had conquered all, and the all-powerful Navigators up and ran away.

      We picked a quaint little pocket of space to set up camp. One star similar to our sun, one habitable planet orbiting it. More desert than our own, and most its water was underground, but otherwise it was a near twin. Called it Humus Novus, which means New Ground in some dead language. Now, we’d gone and filled up our own planet, and spent quadrillions on tech so we could live on planets humans aren’t meant to live on, so we

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