text: [ I've never posted a story here before, so I don't really know the rules/proper format, so I'm just pasting it like this, if the wall of text intimidates you, just read the first paragraph to see if it sounds interesting ;) ] <IGNORE THE NUMBERS> Millennia: The alarm sounds, blaring in Joe’s ears. He sits up, coughing out breathing fluid and reaching for something to hold onto. Looking around, he sees that his cryo chamber [1] was covered by a fallen wall panel, that was pushed out of the way when his unit expanded. Climbing out, he notices that all the chambers nearby are smashed open, and each one contains a single human skeleton. He looks back at the computer mounted into his unit, and sees that the date reads: 02/07/9999. “What happened..” he thinks to himself, “we were supposed to automatically wake up by 2125”. The return journey from the Triton (a moon of Neptune) expedition would take 10 years maximum in their ship, the Lassel-15 [2], and the vessel left Triton atmosphere in 2115. Without any means of explanation for this anomaly, Joe discards this as a technical error. He throws on some clothes, and then heads towards the ships control center to investigate the alarm, and figure out what happened to the crew. Entering the cockpit, Joe sees the words “AUXILIARY POWER LOW” flashing on all screens. “How is this possible?” he exclaims, “the auxiliary power systems in the Lassel-15 are meant to keep the cryo chambers running for.. centuries” [3]. Walking up to the main observing window, he looks out expecting to see the blue-green planet he calls home, but is astonished at the scarred landscape below. From first glance, the Earth seems to be devoid of any oceans, and has clear volcanic activity across the black and brown surface. However, after doing a geological scan with the ship’s instruments, he sees that the Earth is even more devastated than he thought. To begin, the plate tectonics are nothing like they once were, millenia of boundary conditions converging, diverging, and transforming, have levelled all man made structures. They’ve also changed the shapes and sizes of both the oceanic and continental plates. As well, the planet has clearly been peppered with various meteorite impacts, leaving this world nearly incomparable to the Earth Joe remembers [4]. “Could I really have been stuck in cryo sleep for this long?” he wonders. Again, the alarm sounds and he remembers that if he can’t reroute the ship’s power systems, than the oxygen recycler [5] will turn off, and he will suffocate in minutes. Quickly he accesses the closest terminal, and brings up the ship's power distribution center. He sees that the majority of the solar collection units [6] are wasting generated power by sending it to the smashed cryo chambers. “Well I guess we don’t need those anymore..” he says, as he redirects the power to the life support systems, and survey apparatus [7]. The surface of the Earth is clearly too dangerous to explore on foot, so he sends an analysis probe [8] down to look for any sign of civilization. “While that’s away, perhaps I can piece together what happened to the rest of the crew” he exclaims, as he walks back towards the cryo hibernation wing. After inspecting each of the 32 cryo chambers, Joe realizes that he is the sole survivor of the Triton expedition. The entire ship is devoid of any human life, other than himself. However, on his way back to the control center, he notices something odd in the compartment where they store the collected survey samples from Triton. The blast door that seals that area, made of 3-inch thick titanium-aluminum alloy [9], has a large hole torn into the center of it. The edges of the door nearest to the hole have been bent outwards, as if it was torn through from the inside. Joe attempts to open the door remotely with a nearby terminal, but it's clearly too damaged to move. Instead he climbs inside the storage compartment, but is overwhelmed at what he finds inside. The storage compartment was designed with a blast door on the inside, so that the artificial atmosphere inside the ship wouldn't escape when the compartment is opened from the outside. This way samples and materials from the surface of Triton could be put directly onto the ship. However, the much larger blast door that connects the entire room to the outside of the ship, is covered in large, deep, gouge marks, similar to ones seen on the first blast door. On the floor inside the room, lays the massive skeleton of a creature much bigger than anything Joe has ever seen. The bone structure of this long dead corpse, is similar to that of an ant or other arthropod, only instead of being the size of a staple, it’s more comparable to that of a car. Bewildered at this sight, Joe recalls that the ship’s security systems have automated cameras, which will record any movement in the vessel. Dashing to the nearest terminal, Joe brings up the earliest recording since the crew entered cryosleep for the journey home. The first video is from inside the storage compartment, a few months after leaving Triton. A large boulder taken from the surface of Triton is shown shaking, and finally breaking open, to reveal the creature. “It was an egg!” Joe proclaims, as he watches it hatching. The videos show the creature exploring the compartment for a couple hours, and then tearing through the first blast door. This destruction reveals how Joe’s cryo chamber was covered by the wall panel, as the creature pounded on the blast door, the vibrations in the walls caused the panel to come loose and fall off, covering Joe’s unit entirely. The creature then explores the ship, tearing apart various computer systems, and after a few more days it slows down, presumably getting tired and hungry. Eventually, it finds the cryo hibernation wing, and begins to smash the chambers one by one, devouring the thawing and unconscious humans inside. However, the creature’s senses seem to be almost entirely visual based, as it doesn’t realize there is another chamber under the fallen wall panel in Joe’s section. [10] After almost a year of periodical smashing of cryo units and eating humans, the creature finally runs out of food, and retreats to the storage room. Here it gives one final effort to try and break out of the ship through the way it was brought in. It scratches, bites, and pounds at the second blast door, but it is too strong for the creature to break through. It lays down on the floor of the compartment, in the same position the skeleton is in, and dies of starvation. Joe is deeply saddened as he learns the fate of the crew, but he also realizes how lucky it was that he didn’t end up the way they did. He now understands why his unit didn’t open until the emergency power was low, because of the damage the creature did to the onboard automated computers. Deciding the best course of action is to try and find out what happened to the rest his species, he makes his way to the vehicle bay, where the survey probe has just returned. Joe reaches the vehicle bay and immediately accesses the probes data. To begin, the automated radiometric dating information collected by the probe, shows that there has been no fossil records for approximately 15’000 years, and they stopped appearing exactly 350 years after the Triton expedition was planned to return. This means that humans have either gone extinct, or left the planet sometime near the end of the 24th century. The data also reads that the carbon dioxide content within the living organisms on the planet increased exponentially until this time [11]. “Could this be what caused the humans to disappear so suddenly?” Joe wondered. He tries to think of any possible place where a record of what happened to the humans might have survived on the planet for all this time, but he realizes it’s impossible. Everything built on the Earth has been long destroyed by now, and he begins to think there may be no hope left of finding his species. “Wait.. the space station.. orbiting high above all this destruction.. maybe it’s still up here?”. Back in the control center, Joe uses the ship's scanners to look for the largest objects orbiting the Earth 300-500 kilometres high [12]. He finds one reading, and inputs the instructions for the Lassel-15 to automatically move in and match its orbit. The ship shudders as the massive ion engines start up [13] for the first time in thousands of years. Remarkably, the automated flight systems are still intact after the creature demolished so many computer systems, and the ship begins its adjustments to reach the object. After an hour of flight, the ship positions itself 50 metres behind the object, and Joe moves toward the observing window to see what it is. While it is the space station, it’s not how Joe remembers it. With developments in space exploration technology throughout the centuries while Joe was frozen, humanity has clearly added to and modified the original ISS into something very different. It now is over 10x its original size, and includes large docking bays similar to the vehicle bay found in the Lassel-15. He can also see clear decompression sections where astronauts would be able to enter the station from a space walk without the need for docking. Joe tries to instruct the computer to dock with the station, but the automated docking systems are too damaged to work properly. “I guess I'll have to stretch my legs” Joe mutters, as he pulls on a space suit. After he is all geared up, he enters the decompression room and prepares to leave the ship. The room makes a loud noise like a vacuum, and then the door opens. Joe equips a stability assistance pack [14], and jets his way towards the station. Reaching the decompression section, he looks for a latch or type of door to enter, but instead finds an entirely empty wall, seemingly leaving the station open to the vacuum of space. Upon entry, Joe immediately notices technology he’s never imagined. As he floats into the station, the lights turn on, and he falls to the floor. He hears a loud, robotic voice say: “Welcome Joe, it’s been 9, 9, 9, 9, days since your last visit. Feel free to take off your spacesuit”. It seems impossible, but somehow the spot he entered from was actually a door, creating an invisible barrier between the ship and the vacuum of space, that he could pass through safely. As well, the ship is somehow generating its own artificial gravity [15], which is also contained by the invisible door. As Joe walks through the interior of the station, he sees many posters and signs saying things like “Journey to Planet X, where your new home awaits”. “Planet X?.. I’ve never heard of any Planet X before..” says Joe. He finally reaches the main data terminal, and begins looking through the latest entries. He finds one labelled: Planet X Advert which he plays. A suited man walks into screen on a planet that Joe has never seen. The man says: “Climate change is causing our planet to have an unhealthy atmosphere, and we’re running out of fossil fuels. Why not come to Planet X? It’s just a couple years in cryosleep away, here the atmosphere is recycled to ensure the freshest air, and all the energy you need is generated by our state of the art thermal generators deep in the planet's core. You’ll never go hungry with all the food you could ever need grown right here in our bio-domes, and our 100% sustainability means there’s no limit to how long you can stay. And of course, everything is run and maintained by our newly developed AI systems, so you won’t have to work at all! The future is now, come join us”, the video ends [16]. “They’ve.. all left. my entire species has found a new home without me” he thinks, “Why didn’t they come wake me up? Did they forget I was orbiting just above their heads all those years?”. Joe doesn’t know what to do, he has no safe planet to return to, and there's not enough supplies on the Lassel-15 or the ISS to sustain him for the rest of his life. It looks like this could be it, until Joe sees another entry on the terminal. It reads: Final Migration From Earth. He opens the file, and sees that it contains the information regarding the last ship to leave Earth and go to Planet X, including the specific trajectories of Planet X’s extremely elliptical orbit [17]. “With this I might be able to reach them..” he says, hoping that they are still there after all this time. He downloads the information to a data key, puts on his space suit, and jets back to his ship. Once on board, he enters the coordinates of Planet X’s current location, and sets the ship to autopilot itself there. Because the journey would take decades, Joe decides to reprogram his cryo chamber to automatically open once the ship arrives. However, before settling in once more, he makes sure to jettison all the survey samples collected from Triton, just for good measure. He then lays down in his unit, hearing a soft click as it closes, and falls asleep. As it did once before, Joe’s unit pops open, and he is pleasantly surprised not to hear any blaring alarms in his ears this time. He gets dressed, and then excitedly walks down to the control center to see Planet X for the first time. He is slightly concerned when he looks out the window to see a very barren, cold planet, with no visible signs of humans living anywhere on it [18]. But as the planet rotates on it’s axis, it reveals a massive civilization built onto the surface. “They are still here.. I can finally see another human being again” he mutters, filled with optimism. Joe is about to get into a landing craft and head down to the surface [19], when something on the ship’s arrival scans catches his eye. It reads: Heat Signatures Detected: 0. Too eager to reach the planet, Joe ignores this and assumes it’s just another malfunction from the damage the creature did. He boards a landing craft, and flies down towards the planet. On the way down, the craft picks up a radio signal. Joe connects to the frequency, and hears the same voice he heard on the ISS say: “Hello Joe, it’s good to see you again, please go to the marked landing pad”. A marker shows up on the HUD of the cockpit [20] and Joe heads towards it. As the ship touches down, a tunnel extends from the massive facility built into the side of the planet, and connects to the landing craft’s door. Joe is so happy to know that his species is ok and he can finally see someone again, that he runs down the tunnel the moment the door opens. He gets to the end finding another door, and as he walks up to it he can't help but remember how the ship said there were no heat signatures on the planet, and that voice he heard was automated too. “Oh well” he thinks, “that commercial said that the AI does everything for them right?”. The door opens, and Joe looks into the facility, to see hundreds of humanoid robots standing, looking at him [21].