Fifteen Thousand Years After Perseus

Greetings to everyone, the following story was inspired by the digital art of @xpilar, I invite you to visit his blog. The picture that motivated this story is the following.

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Fifteen Thousand Years After Perseus

More than fifteen thousand years have passed since the Perseus spacecraft descended on a hostile planet that became humanity's last hope, at least that was until about fourteen thousand years later it was discovered that far distant from where Perseus was established, another human colony had prospered, and then was abandoned, Andromeda, whose descendants undertook a journey without destination, in the direction of Norma's Arm and from there to the non-visible region of the galaxy.

Now, a new discovery leaves doubt as to whether more human colonies that have not yet been discovered will have prospered. Thanks to the inexplicable appearance of an Einstein-Rosen bridge, on a planet now colonized by humans, a route was opened to Bernard's Galaxy and a colonizing ship was found there, whose cargo of embryos had been taken by some entity, possibly not human.

Much has happened since Perseus was founded, today, it is no longer the most important of the colonized planets, the descendants of those first ten thousand children, have multiplied into hundreds of billions and have populated thirty-eight worlds, in addition to several tens of thousands of space stations.

Perseus is today a relic within the populated worlds, only a small fringe of its surface is habitable. Because of the orbital coupling, one of its faces always looks at its star and in it the temperatures are unbearably high, while in the other face the temperatures are lower than two hundred Kelvin, creating a thick layer of ice on its ocean.

Because of this dichotomy, the only region of the planet with a moderately tolerable climate is the twilight line, a strip between both faces where one lives a permanent dusk, in which the temperatures are similar to those of a tropical region, with strong gusts of warm winds coming from the diurnal side of the planet and are counteracted by the cold air gusts blowing from the night face.

Perseus is the least populated of the colonized planets, only fifteen cities and a population of thirty-two million, making it an almost unpopulated world. Today it is fundamentally a place of pilgrimage, for its historical attraction and those who live there live mainly from tourism.

From the shores of Perseus I, its first city, located just where the Perseus spacecraft descended and the first colony was founded, located on a thin strip of land, in one direction you can see the thunderstorms ravaging the illuminated face of the planet while the beaches on the opposite side are visited by icebergs coming from the dark side ice sheet.

Today Perseus is the closest thing that humanity has to an origin, it is the world that everyone recognizes as the place where everything began. The Earth is now a forbidden and forgotten world, a world that first turned its back on its inhabitants, forcing them to flee, in desperate colonization missions that led to the death of all who knew it. Then to host a wandering alien race, which after losing its maternal world, found in the ancient world of origin of humanity, a refuge in which to thrive.

Text of @amart29 Barcelona, Venezuela, October 2019

Otros relatos de la serie La Era de Perseo / Other stories from the series The Age of Perseus

• El Averno / The Avern
• Camino a Dione / Road to Dione
• Las Noches de Palas / The Nights of Palas
• ¿Natural o Generado? / Natural or Generated?
• Los Cristalodermos de Quimera / The Crystaloderms of Chimera
• Una Casa para el Parlamento / A House for Parliament
• Alone
• Fifteen Thousand Years After Perseus

I can only thank @xpilar for allowing me to use his digital art in my publication and for motivating my creation. Thank you very much @xpilar

Thank you all for visiting my publication, I hope your comments and I appreciate your support, until next time

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