Lauren’s blackness, originally Genesis‘s cultural mascot, had given her something her fellow crew members and thousands of hand-picked embryos lacked: immunity. The gene encoding for higher levels of melanin production seemed to be protective all of the survivors were of African descent. The computer’s genetic scanning and in-depth analysis had readily identified the issue: suspension decayed genomes at a rate only measurable over millions of years. “Four hundred twenty-four remain intact and are undergoing active mitoses,” Al said. According to the most advanced artificial intelligence ever created, Lauren had a seventy-eight percent chance of dying a failure, frustrated and alone. The twenty-two percent would require Lauren’s best effort. New Earth’s atmosphere was largely carbon dioxide and an average of ten degrees Celsius warmer than Old Earth’s. “Approximately twenty-two point nine-five percent,” Al said. She’d heard the answer several times in the last three sleep cycles. “What’s the probability of being able to sustain long-term human life on this planet?” she asked. A smell like pond water brought memories of her aunt’s garden. Lauren clicked the display closed, paused again to marvel at how small she was in the shadow of the passing gas giant, and walked through a dissolving door into the incubator room. Some final bacteria at the bottom of some parallel to the Marianas Trench could have converted its last molecule of glucose a million years ago and Al would have detected its organic matter. The bottom of the screen read: PLANET 5X22, GENESIS SOLAR SYSTEM, GENESIS CLUSTER, GENESIS GALAXY, 2.143 BILLION LIGHT YEARS FROM EARTH / 580 MILLION KILOMETERS AND 23H43M FROM STARSHIP GENESIS. Any land currently slept on the far side the borderless sea itself was silent. The first orbiting planet was a perfect blue, capped white with creamy wisps and swirls. Pointers showed Genesis in relation to this solar system’s star, which held three times the mass of the Sun. The artificial intelligence’s mind hummed through the spacecraft. Coordinates decoded from BabyWatch occupied the rest of the screen. Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum mechanics took up half, Lauren’s equations linking the two. She punched a button on the control panel and the window shimmered as glass turned into a computer display. This new galaxy was eerily familiar, but far from home all the same. A spot of shadow coursed freely over the chaos. Lines of various shades of orange swirled and fell into itself as the massive planet rotated. Outside the cockpit window, a gas giant hung surreal in the black. There was no room for a grieving mother’s speculations. And now Lauren was solely responsible for what could be humanity’s last chance. But Earth didn’t survive long enough to see NASA launch its more serious, less romantic seeder ships to nearby stars. She thought her search for Sean at the edge of physics would only be a side story: she’d take an escape pod to Sagittarius’s event horizon while Genesis lived up to its name. And when the mission needed an ethnic face, Lauren readily obliged. She’d originally pitched the idea of using a wildcard interstellar voyage as a way to gain publicity and support for NASA’s more ambitious colonization program. None of the eleven other crew-members had survived the years of suspension. Two billion light years from home, six and a half billion years after the last signal from Earth, and the small battery-powered screen still showed the same twelve-hour loop, over and over again. She stared at the BabyWatch monitor in the cockpit of the spaceship Genesis, wondering if her sanity had died with her son. Lauren never stopped screaming, even when it seemed she had. It was a black Prius, worn and dented and scratched and horrible, rolling silently over her son to replace him, as if by magic. “Okay, time out as soon as–” Lauren said, but choked when she saw that Sean hadn’t tugged at all. “A black dog.” She silently cursed at her failing grip on the bags. Of his budding vocabulary, identifying dogs was a family favorite. “A dog!” Sean pointed at passing poodle as big as him. The rest of her life would be haunted by ‘should’ves’. She should have ignored the aching pain in her back and picked him up. She should have walked with Sean on the inside. She should have used a cart to carry the groceries. “Ask one more time and you’re getting a time out when we get home.” Lauren led her two-year-old son, Sean, slowly to their car while carrying three full bags of groceries.
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