This was a 250 word piece for The Writer’s Mess Friday Picture Prompt Challenge, based on the picture below. This one is another sci fi, this time about sending out a ship to start life on a new planet. My goal was to make this a little lighter that the upcoming Six Sentence story, but my nature prevailed, and it’s a little dark as well.
Callista added the last samples to the capsule, and pressed it into place. The drawer lock clicked, and the pleasant chirp of the verification system indicated that it had been accepted.
This was it, the ark was complete. All biological samples were safely aboard, and tomorrow the ship would launch for a new world.
She stared for a minute at the ark’s glowing power source. It would provide the energy needed for terraforming, for creating their new home, and she prayed that it would work.
The ark would launch tomorrow, but in one year she would follow it, one of many who were chosen to populate the new colony, or so people thought. It wasn’t just a colony, it was the last, best hope for their race to survive.
The planet was running out of resources, the utopia of no disease and long life quickly turned into a shortage of supplies, and people just assumed that at some point the government would fix it.
The truth was that they were going to do nothing, because in less than a decade the amount of energy being harvested from the core would stop the planet spinning, leaving the world a lifeless husk.
It would be three years before the effects became wide spread, before people realized that the colonists had gone to repopulate the species, and the rest of them had been left to die.
So Callista prayed, that this ark would work as it should, because everything depended on it.
Anne McSommers' Writing Nook 