章 11: War

I arrived at earth 571 years after I had left and I could tell immediately that something had happened as a few small habitats surrounded the planet and the earth was now mostly a browned wasteland inhospitable to life. I hailed the orbital habitats and eventually received a response from a older gentleman who basically told me that there was nothing to take but their lives and that they were the last of their people. I naturally was curious as to what exactly I had missed so using my best "human" voice I asked what happened and got a reply that read like a bad punchline basically earth had been invaded 200 years ago and only the fledgling mars colony and the orbital habitats were spared simply because there was nothing either could do. I decided that I might not be human anymore but I would not see the race that had given birth to me go extinct so I started building a massive moon sized habitat in orbit of mars I had to dust off the various life support files that I had collected over the years and then sort them into maintenance levels and efficiency and soon I found a winner that only required living people to consume and excrete waste it was very efficient and even provided a food source if you could get past the fact that you were eating food grown in your own waste and I even had a couple frozen samples of both the starter bacteria and the algae that were required for the system. The habitat took seven months to finalize and then another month of cajoling the various habitat dwellers to transfer to the new habitat and soon every orbital had been emptied and my new habitat was operating at full capacity I even left them some shuttles and the equipment to mine asteroids if they managed their resources well they would be living quite well I even installed a gravity system into the station set at 5% earth normal and it would gradually increase one percent a year until earth normal 1g.