Chapter Text
My name is Micah Evans, though you might know me better as convict GP-8991-D. Long story short, I’m an innocent man. Yeah, save me the laughs, I know the stereotype, everyone in prison is innocent of what they were convicted of.
I don’t claim to be a boyscout, but I was never a criminal.
Thankfully my Grandfather passed before I got set up. No matter what I did or how well I did it, he always said I was trouble and wouldn’t amount to much. Probably because I looked so much like my Dad and Dad was a sorry piece of crap. He hated my Dad the moment my Mom brought Dad home to meet them.
Normally our communication devices would show where we are, but there was some kind of weird glitch in the system, mine kept fritzing in and out. It was showing me in five different locations in rapid fire succession with no earthly way of being able to travel the distance between them that fast.
I had an alibi for the time of the crime, but it was my best friend Eddie and they discredited him. Using the tired excuse that he was just covering for me. Since I was hanging with Eddie, my girl Sue was out hanging with her best friend at her house. Interestingly they never went after him for supposedly lying under oath.
They made claims that Sue had been seeing some guy behind my back and claimed that when I found out about it I went crazy and must have killed the guy.
Funny, the first I knew of it was when my public defender was laying out their case against me so we could “strategize”.
I didn’t recognize the crime scene, a typical bachelor looking bedroom with lots of motorcycle type memorabilia and it surely didn’t look like someone in a fit of rage, much less crazy, had killed the guy. It looked like whoever did it had been in bed with him, a single blade strike. The entry wound was below his rib cage, the medical examiner stated it had entered from a point three inches below the sternum and thrust upwards where the blade pierced through the diaphragm and up into the heart. A very well placed strike if you ask me, with no sign of struggle until after the strike and what fight he had left, didn’t last long.
Call me crazy, but if I was seeking revenge against some guy in a case like that I would start with cutting his nuts off. I knew I didn’t kill the guy so I knew they were lying about Sue.
Of course Sue denied any involvement with the guy and testified I wasn’t the kind of guy to go off half-cocked like that. The photos they provided as evidence were a crock. The only thing you could make out about the woman was that she had red hair. But whether it was dyed or natural or even a wig couldn’t be determined. They didn’t even have any forensics showing my girl had even been in that place. They hung the accusation on an eye witness testimony and having picked my girl out of a photo line up of other red heads. They couldn’t even establish how they arrived at the conclusion that my girl could have even been involved beyond the eye witness.
From the death of the guy to my trial less than three months had passed. Tell me I wasn’t being railroaded. Hell, it was unheard of for a murder case to go to trial in less than a year before me. Unless you count lynchings and this sure as hell felt like one. Eddie and Sue were scrambling, trying to come up with credits to help fund a defense but it wasn’t going well.
The jury did not look impressed with our defense being that he had been killed by someone he trusted enough to be alone in bed with. The budget for the public defender barely covered a third rate washed up coroner who I’m sure was either hungover or partially drunk as he testified.
Eddie and Sue were in the courtroom each day, not that the trial lasted a long time, just three days.
The jury deliberated for less than three hours. My attorney said it wasn’t a good sign they were back that fast. You think? I was found guilty and sentenced to the worst possible place, a prison that housed a number of members from a gang that apparently the guy I was just found guilty of murdering was part of.
Now I take care of myself, I’m not over weight or have a lot of muscle, I do know how to fight but be real. One on one I might be okay unless they have special training or a weapon.
Eddie told me he was still trying to raise some credits as fast as he could to get a private eye to look into the case. I shook his hand and kissed Sue a final time. I told them it would be best to just forget about me. I’d be an old man before I got out of prison, if I got out. He said we were friends and friends don’t bail, Sue was an emotional mess, but nodded in agreement.
I was sitting in the holding cell waiting on the bus to take me to my destiny when my attorney showed up. He was with the prosecutor and a guy I hadn’t seen before.
My attorney cautioned me, but said there was an offer to avoid prison. That got my attention, you could color me intrigued.
The man was a recruiter for an inter-galactic company called Sentinel Corporation. They had an offer for me, a chance to not to go to prison and to “earn” a commutation. A way to pay off my debt. They wanted me to become a planet terraformer.
Yeah, you read that right, they wanted me, a community college graduate with an AS in Mechanical Engineering Technology to go alone to an alien world and terraform it for a future colony.
Prison was a death sentence, with the people from that guy’s gang in there. There had been other terraformers, also convicts, not many and some had even completed their tasks in less than twenty years. That’s at least five to ten years earlier than my sentence in prison and one guy got it done in just under ten years. It still felt more like a death sentence but at least it would be a struggle against the planet and not gang members of whom I wouldn’t know in order to protect myself from.
At least I had engineering skills that might help if anything were to go wrong. My attorney set up a conference call with my Mom, Eddie and Sue. Eddie didn’t like it at all, Sue thought it was worth considering, but I only had about twenty minutes to decide before the transport bus got there to pick me up. Mom said she’d support my decision, she said she believed in me. Man, along with caring for her Mom, this whole mess had taken a toll on her. She looked like she’d aged ten years at least.
I made up my mind and I thanked them all for their friendship, support and love. I probably wouldn’t survive a month in that prison, let alone twenty five years to life and so I hung up and signed the paperwork.
Next thing I know I’m on a helicopter flying down to Sentinel’s Mexico based facility. I figured I’d go through a couple of months of training there before being sent to this other planet. Nope, I was advised I would receive all my training en route. So three hours after arriving I was put in a maglev tether carriage and sent up into space. About one hour of travel to their facility that is just on the edge of Earth’s gravity well. That was an experience, the g-forces that were pulled were intense. Nearly made me barf when the carriage decelerated.
A small transport arrived an hour after I did, to take me to a place I’d never heard of before, the Izitial Prime sector, to a planet they call Humble-IP168. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. So many unknowns, the only thing known is there aren’t any lifeforms on the planet, so it should be safe as far as my becoming something’s meal or fighting over resources.
It’ll take about a week to get to the Earth’s warp gate and then about a month of travel to the closest warp gate of Izitial Prime sector. Our warp gate is locked in orbit about our Sun in the Earth’s shadow, protecting it from flares and other emissions from the Sun.
The robots told me that once we exited the other warp gate it would take us about three weeks to arrive at the planet. Great, not another living soul on this bucket of bolts, nothing but AI. Decent enough, don’t get me wrong, but what do they know of life and death?
Traveling in hyper-space was interesting. All my training during the trip was physical. Every time I asked about training on the equipment and stuff, the robots promised me I had plenty of time. That my physical endurance and abilities were more crucial to survive in the hostile environment.
That was troubling, but they explained what they meant was the conditions not hostile lifeforms. That I’d have to be able to trek long distances, carrying heavy loads of resources to build different machines and facilities.
Finally about a week before we’d arrive at the planet I was introduced to my basic gear, the most important piece was the omni-tool. With it I could gather up any of the resources on the surface, it would, basically, molecularly break it apart and reassemble them in the backpack. It will also take the resources and combine them to form all the things needed to survive and terraform the planet with. I wish I had a tech manual for it, in case something goes wrong, they claim it is nearly indestructible.
The exoskeleton was pretty important as well. It shifted the weight of what I carried to my hips for one, for another it contained a bank of slots for additional computer chips to augment the omni-tool’s functions. It is also where things like the backpack were mounted. The backpack was a joke, it would only hold twelve items at a time. The robots told me I would receive plans periodically as I advanced the planet in terraforming. Everything from better equipment to new machines and facilities. Next was the crafting station. Through it I would be able to create better gear, but they couldn’t explain why they didn’t just start me off with the better gear.
You’d think if they wanted this to be successful they’d give me all the help I could use. One of the robots I got to calling R2, after that ancient Star Wars movie character, though she did have legs unlike the other character and mainly because she was a bit sassy. She suggested it was because the corporation didn’t trust convicts.
That made me laugh, but she was probably right. Yes, I refer to R2 as female, she reminds me of Sue, she’s so full of sass.
A funny thing is, as of this year, 3058, we’ve had twenty three remakes of that movie series, and the original three movies are still better, despite having such laughable special effects compared to today.
We were just short of entering orbit when the ship was hit with something, a type of EMP maybe. Systems were shutting down left and right. R2 came running to get me. She pushed me towards an escape pod as there was no way for the ship to land. She kept telling me I had to get out of there, if the ship’s docking system went down before launching I’d be trapped on a ship in a decaying orbit.
It wasn’t a large ship as I said but when your adrenaline is pumping you don’t exactly think straight let me tell you.
I slid into the escape pod and R2 stopped at the doorway. I told her to come with me rather than stay on a dying ship.
She shook her head no as she told me my energy needs were more important. Before I could argue she accessed the control panel causing the seals of the ship and pod to close and then I felt the explosive bolts fire and I was jettisoned from the ship. Thankfully I already had my suit on and I sat down in the jump seat and strapped in before putting on my helmet. This was the part I hated, I’m not claustrophobic per se, but this gear was all that stood between me and certain death.
I heard R2’s voice a final time telling me she was trying to jettison the rest of my supplies.
It didn’t take long before the pod entered the heavier atmosphere and the roar of the engine driving the pod coupled with the sound of the atmosphere rushing past was nearly deafening. Through the viewports of the escape pod I could see the planet was a light brown mustard looking color, not very appealing at all. The damn voice of the pod kept saying “Emergency” and that the pod was off course, to correct my trajectory. Like, do you see a control stick here? I closed my eyes as I heard “Impact imminent!” I tried thinking of my Mom, Sue and Eddie. At least the last month hadn’t been spent fighting to survive knife attacks and being beaten up.
Suddenly the engine driving the pod shut down and then a new roar erupted under my feet and I felt myself squish down into the seat cushion as the retro rockets caused the pod to begin slowing down. The landing engine came online, maybe I would survive after all.
The pressure against me dissipated fairly quickly and a few minutes later I felt the pod “touch down”, more than a bit rough, with a loud banging. Clearly the system came online a bit late, but I’m not complaining, I was alive!
The door blew open as the electro-static forcefield protected the inside of the craft from the outside environment. The HUD built into the helmet came up and showed me some of the main objectives. To hell with their objectives, I had new objectives right now, dealing with survival. Terraformation could take a back seat. Though some of them were needed for survival as well, I have to admit.
The dust was thick, either from the engine or naturally, not that it mattered. I knew the craft’s power wouldn’t last too long. Based on the instruments of the pod there was good wind flow here. I needed to build a wind turbine to maintain the pod’s power for the forcefield and oxygen extractor. The wind turbines are roughly about eight foot tall poles with swirled vertical blades that rotate around the pole converting that mechanical energy into electrical energy.
I pulled out the omni-tool and double checked its connection to the suit’s exoskeleton. I clicked on the omni-tool and swore, they hadn’t even given me a construction chip for the damn device. I couldn’t build the wind turbines without it. I checked the stripped down version of the crafting station aboard the pod for what was needed to make the chip. I needed to find two pieces of magnesium as well as two pieces of silicon. As my training had taught me, it didn’t take that much material to make the chip, but to ensure enough quality material I needed fairly large amounts.
I shook my head as I tried to remember what they said the material would look like before I stepped up to the exit. After I had, I looked out and around the landing site before stepping out. I’m not religious but I still closed my eyes and said a small prayer and then stepped through the forcefield onto an alien planet.