A Beginning

He knelt in the sand. Strange sand. It made him think of iron filings. A mix of mud and clay and iron. The sky a shade of blue that reminded him of tropical oceans. Of beautiful reefs and beaches where the sea and sky were matching cerulean shades; and mixtures of nothing and anything were possible.

Those were images he’d seen online. Historical archives.

Because everybody knew there were no such things left in the world now.

No world left.

He remembered the joy that went viral when sensors found this planet. He remembered the taste of champagne, the taste of laughter, and the taste of hope. If the images had been sobering – grey, dun, tan; miles of empty, lifeless, metallic sand – they hadn’t been enough to dampen the enthusiasm. This was still a new beginning. And his people were no primitives, they’d built an artificial world that could float through the stars without slowing down, and they’d lived and died on that artificial world, raised families, written novels, sculpted magnificent artworks.

And if nothing was quite the same as the inherited memory of grass, rivers, lakes, trees, flowers; well, their time was coming again. He took the first of the tiny plants out and released it from its tube. The bottom of the tube offered a little spike that he could use to stamp a hole in the ground and fill that hole with a supercharged fertiliser. Into that he gently placed the plant.

He could see it already. The way the fertiliser began to spread through the ground, the plant already trembling with its energy, already starting to bud. Seeds embedded in the fertiliser flowed through this new planet, establishing themselves as he watched, shoving up at the iron-ground, seeking this new, orange-yellow sun.

He moved on to the next site, taking out the next plant.

This was it then. A new beginning.

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work.