Fog

Warning lights burned as he stepped into the airlock, sealed inside a rubbery environmental suit. Deep, drawn-out breaths echoed through the mask, sounding almost like ghosts riding gusts of wind.

Fog covered the surface of their new world, making it nearly impossible to see anything. For months now, the last humans to complete the journey had lived inside a metal complex. There were only a thousand of them, living out their days in labs or observation rooms. Not one of them had left.

Now, that would change. The outer door swung open with a soundless hiss, flooding the room with dense fog. The outside world was a soundless white, punctuated only by the flashing lights and the orange of his protective suit—a reminder that such technology was out of place; a remnant of a dead world.

Rubber boots scraped against the metal steps as warm water welled over his feet. A final step, and he was nearly submerged, up to his stomach in water the color and temperature of mint tea. Fog seemed to part in front of him, as if an organism were swallowing his orange-suited body whole. A milky-white maw closed behind, leaving the only color in the direction of the airlock’s flashing strobes.

Probably warmed by hot springs, they had mentioned at the meeting earlier that morning. He imagined how he looked from the colony behind him—a tiny, orange blob wading through a surprisingly clear swamp.

I could be the first living thing to touch this world.

The planet’s gravity was slightly less than on Earth, but after decades in space, even the lessened weight was punishing. A tiny red object sat on the water in front of him, tethered to its neighbor by a series of hairlike roots. They resembled lily pads, he thought, though their physical appearance was more that of a head of lettuce. The swamp-lettuce thickened the farther he went until the clear water was covered with a dense mat of blood-colored foliage, if it could even be called that.

He thought he saw a massive, black tree trunk explode from the water in front of him—perhaps it was his imagination. The object was stationary—there had been no movement at all. Only the fog moved around the tree, which rose from the swamp on spindly roots like a misshapen gourd with spider’s legs. The trunk he had seen was only one of many that supported the gourd-tree’s lumpy structure, he realized. On the steel and iron behemoth that had carried them to this new world, trees had been few and far between.

And yet, even now, they had barely survived. They had arrived on the new world with no idea what to expect, knowing only that it would still be difficult to survive. As the landing pod had reached the surface for the final time, there had been no fanfare. No one had stepped from the metal pod into a fertile landscape filled with blue skies and green trees.

They had landed in a tea-colored swamp, the same color of the drinks one would serve on late afternoons, when water had been far less precious. The entire world resembled a snowball from space—not because it was frozen, as they had initially believed, but because the world was shrouded in mist, accentuated above the clouds only by the occasional mountain peak or hurricane.

It never rained—something he longed to feel against his space-weary skin. Instead, fog banks of varying density would roll in from the mountains—or, at least, where their scanners told them mountains would be. They could grow no food on a world where the land was covered with tea spilled from a celestial cup. The air, nearly pure carbon dioxide, seemed to be the product of a form of reverse photosynthesis; plants drew oxygen and nitrogen from the waters around them and released only unbreathable gases into the humid atmosphere.

There was little hope they could ever breathe on their new world. It was always possible to recycle the air inside their metallic bubbles, but something about that wasn’t the same. Something had stayed the same, however, even after decades in space. Here, on a world brimming with life, there was nothing for them.

He recalled a moment in the greenhouses on the ship, when he transplanted a tomato seedling from a diseased bed to another. The plant’s dirt-speckled roots had swayed in the weightless greenhouse, as if it were reaching out, struggling to find a new home. The plant had been secured in a new tray, but the leaves had continued to wilt with disease in the days leading up to its eventual death. It wasn’t enough that he had moved it to a new patch. The fresh soil had been too much of a shock for the dying seedling, and at that point, the transplant was little more than palliative care.

Like us.

They had fled their dying world, uprooting themselves and soaring between worlds in what had always thought would be a grand journey. But they weren’t meant to survive here. It wasn’t nature’s way to move from one world to another—that was a privilege reserved only for meteors, comets, and stardust. Life itself was an accident; their intelligence was never meant to be. They had been transplanted from a home on the brink of death to a place that had never been meant for them.

They were tiny seedlings, struggling to grow in the desert. Life could exist in the desert, of course. But not them. Not here.

They were living proof that humans could not survive away from their world.

“Approaching now,” he whispered into the respirator’s intercom. “Sample will be extracted from the…” He paused. “…ventral side of the organism…”

“Proceed,” the controller said in his ear. There was a team of scientists on the other side of that intercom, figuring out the best way to extract samples from the gourd-tree for analysis.

The object towered overhead, nearly invisible in the dense fog as he stepped between the suspended roots. They vaguely resembled that of a bald cypress, but earlier sensor analysis had revealed that they were, in fact, segmented trunks, not roots at all.

The gourdlike portion was not directly overhead, and he was surrounded by an eerily claustrophobic cage of tree trunks.

“Sampling… now,” he said, looking upwards and holding the biopsy device over the mottled bark. Upon closer inspection, there was no bark at all—only a soft skin-like material with the texture of stone.

Three arms slid from the sides of the sampling device, grasping the tissue before plunging a drill-like apparatus into the tree. A jet of air flew from the syringe, and a core of the mottled tree’s interior slowly slid upwards and into the tube below. It was an almost spongy consistency—like that of the ancient ocean creatures on Earth.

“The sample seems to be… quite porous…” he advised the recording device. “This may explain the plant’s height on such structures…”

Not a plant, he thought. Not an animal. Something else.

The characteristics of life here were so different; even the things that appeared to be plants were not. Every kingdom and class and phylum they had developed back on Earth was gone now. The only life left from their world was the few plants and small animals they had brought along: mice, spiders, salmon. Nothing of meaningful diversity, and all of it only of use to humans.

They told themselves that they had been lucky to escape—the one species clever enough to pull itself from a dying world, along with the few fortunately extant organisms. But if humans had never come into existence, they would never be here, on this strange planet. The world they had left behind would not have died if left to its own devices—they had killed the Earth, then fled.

If we had never existed, life itself would still flourish.

There was life here, to be certain, but it was in another star system and so distinctly separate that it seemed almost like pseudo-life—closer to the plasticky trees he remembered from his childhood than to the living organisms.

But humans did exist now, as they had for millions of years. Intelligence was inevitable from an evolutionary standpoint, and it had only been a matter of time once the first cells divided in the boiling oceans so long ago. Life was an accident, but one accident had led to another and the organisms that had crawled from the ocean soon turned around and destroyed them.

We never did realize where we came from.

There was a gentle noise; the sampling device had finished the extraction.

“Withdrawing the sample now,” he said, not sure if any of the scientists were still listening. “The core seems to be stable.”

The machine’s three claws sprang backwards, detaching from the tree’s underside with a noise like suction cups. Blueish fluid poured from the hole the sampler had made, as if a reservoir within the tree had been punctured. The liquid poured over his arms and into the swamp, staining everything a deep navy. For a moment, he feared that the tree’s blood could be corrosive, but he hoped the suit was strong as he dipped the dirty rubber into the water.

The flow of fluid slowed to a gentle trickle, and it was then that he imagined each gourd-tree not as a plant, but as a water tower of sorts, calling to mind the maple syrup traditions of the past. That was something of a bygone era—there were no more maple trees, and every meal was the same combination of dispensed goop and protein cakes.

“Heading back,” he announced to no one, feeling increasingly alone. The fog was thickening now, or perhaps it was the fading light. Night fell every five hours on their quickly rotating world; he had been taught to call this strange place home, but it was so unlike any place that humans had ever inhabited that everyone had been reluctant to see it as anything but a temporary home.

The walk through the swamp seemed longer this time, but not because of the sample in its protective box. The red lily pads had covered his path, and there was a brief, almost stupid moment of panic when he forgot where the colony was.

Of course, he had walked only in a straight line, as animals tended to do in an environment where they had lost their way. A searchlight swept in a circle atop the complex, briefly blinding him once every few seconds like a lighthouse.

You can hardly call this a colony, he thought. It’s a metal box that fell from the sky and landed in a swamp.

It was a large box, granted, but it was overflowing with useless supplies and people; there weren’t enough cabins for everyone, and the colony pod had been designed as a field lab, to be separate from the main facility.

The facility that had been destroyed.

No one had ever figured out how much they had lost during the rebellion—so many irreplaceable items had already been forgotten. The decompression had knocked a shuttle into another, causing a chain reaction that destroyed two science pods and the main colony complex, sending brief gasps of fire into the vacuum of space.

Compartmentalized systems had saved them that day—years before their arrival on the new world. They had lost two thousand that day, along with another two in the decades of shortages afterwards.

But even if the rebellion had never happened, he doubted that they would have ever had enough supplies—it had been one accident, after all, and it was almost inconceivable to think that life here could ever have been easy.

Rubber boots scraped against the steps, and he was out of the swamp again, standing on a metal platform. The airlock door swung open, marking the end of another daily expedition. Samples were collected and analyzed, before it was declared that more samples were needed. If the scientists kept this up any longer, he would begin to think that they were merely saying this for the benefit of the civilians. There was little hope, they all knew. But any chances of success depended heavily on whether or not hope would remain. Even if there was no hope at all, the one concern of the leadership would be explaining how success was just around the corner as they began to suffocate.

Any success we hope to have depends on keeping the illusion alive, does it not?

He cast a final glance out at the darkening water, almost certain he had heard sounds through his suit’s helmet—the whisper of fog, of their fading future, of the coming storm.