<Local Diary - Entry One - Clark, E>
Everything felt cold for a while. As I woke up, the CryoPod was beeping like crazy as it tried to regulate its temperature. That machine was the one that kept me alive during the longest journey of our current history, but by God was it noisy and uncomfortable; surely our High Command has better machines, especially that snob, Suzanne. She surely got deluxe treatment, but well, I’m just a simple ARC Recruit Spy.
It took me a couple of minutes to fully regain consciousness, and who knows how many to start moving my limbs again. Yes, we were told about the effect of long term cryo sleep, but experiencing it was just a whole different league for me. When I was feeling better, I heard a familiar sound. The locks from the CryoPod were unlocking, finally. The egg-shaped door made a metallic sound and started opening. Light started pouring into my pod, really, honest to God, alien light! As my eyes adapted to its environment, I quickly jumped out of my pod and began walking through the endless gray hallway that housed all the other 5000 pods that were also beginning to open. There were some people out already, congratulating themselves for the successful journey, couples that were feeling the touch of each other’s skin for the first time in 400 years (Who says time defeats love?) and even one or two crying tears of joy as they realized that this wasn’t a dream. Most people were staring out the left side “windows”, which gave a magnificent view of our new home, the lush terran world of Tauri A.
Me? I came in here alone. I was born in a really poor part of what was left of Florida after it was almost covered by the sea during the Great Mistake. When my parents died, I was just 16 years old. At that age, life was really tough, there were no schools in my town, so I never got a proper education and jobs were really scarce, mostly I helped with my father’s farm. Both my parents died of hunger when one of our harvests failed, me being who resisted hunger more easily. I was on the verge of giving up on my life when I heard that the ARC had opened a recruiting center near my home. I enrolled; they gave me food, education, military and espionage training. When I was introduced to the force as a Recruit, the Seeding started. The ARC under Suzanne Fielding was taking any spies they could get, especially young ones like me, who still had a lifetime ahead to live in order to colonize a new planet. Crazy, right? Anyway, I’ve been with them ever since.
As I was saying, mostly everyone was awake or in the process of doing so. I went to the windows and stared out of them. The view was like nothing you’ve ever seen. We were in orbit of a new world, a blank slate. It was enormous, with a greenish atmosphere that covered a giant sea of also greenish water and three huge landmasses and several islands. Unlike earth, the colors that we could see from the landmass were deep green, likely from the jungles and weird spots of purple and strong tones of orange, definitely there was something going on there. That’s when we heard a mechanical voice, through the speakers: “Everyone to your stations, Protocol: Eagle is Landing is under effect.” My only thought was:
“Finally, Planetfall.”
