The Ark

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The Ark

In a distant and isolated uninhabited planet, in complete secrecy to most humans, one of several hundred ships, whose arrival was planned, dropped another bucket of equipment into the growing pile that was forming on a beach. The materials for the construction of a genetic storage vault began to accumulate waiting for the construction team.

The genetic storage vaults were an idea taken from the very origin of the new humanity, only that on this occasion they were trying to work safely, even when human beings had spread over a large galactic sector and were not confined to a single world, still thought of the possibility of a catastrophic event that could annihilate life in that sector and erase its existence forever.

In order to prevent this situation, the construction of vaults was initiated that would store data repositories with the genetic information of billions of humans and several billion individuals of other species, even those not coming from the Earth, that had been found in the different inhabited planets, with which humans had come across during their pilgrimage through the galaxy.

Unlike the colonizing ships that were once sent from Earth, they would not store embryos that could affect and compromise the future of the species that inhabit the known sector of the galaxy, in a case of crisis. Instead, only hundreds of brontobytes of data would be stored, replicated hundreds of times, and would be updated regularly as long as humanity and its known species continued to grow.

These vaults would be located on uninhabited planets, which even though they would not be terraformed, would have the conditions to be easily transformed in a few centuries, and would be built in underground complexes, fed by dark matter reactors and operated exclusively by robots controlled by redundant artificial intelligence.

The planets on which they would be built would be located in unpopulated and inaccessible areas through the network of bridges, and would only be visited once every five hundred years, to receive an update of the data of the genetic repository, as well as of the AI software and the robots operators.

In case of not receiving the update according to the chronogram, the AI would try to communicate through an encrypted data package and a laser signal, if it did not receive a human response, the recolonization of the galaxy would gradually begin, starting with the terraforming of the planets where the vaults would be located.

The population, in this case, would begin with the construction of the embryos, which would be developed using programmable genetic material, configured according to the data in the repository. In case of an unprecedented catastrophe, in which the life of the galaxy was annihilated, it was expected that the machines and data of the vaults could survive to repopulate it with a new humanity. As once happened, almost miraculously, when Perseus managed to find a world to start from scratch.

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
• Storm
• Water
• Vilma
• The Ark

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