There Are Some Survivors

We join our crew midway through their voyage. Venus has been destroyed. There are some survivors. They are searching. They are searching. They lived as souls unclothed without the need of clothes, but now they are clothed—they call the things body suits. The ships computers having been programmed before they left need no further guidance. And anyway, those were destroyed when the craft was struck by a meteor a hundred thousand years ago and could no longer be guided or corrected, even if there was anyone left with specific knowledge of their existence or the knowledge to program them. Those people were gone. And they had been gone for a very long time. It is a huge ship they think, though a goldfish probably thinks the outside of his bowl looks vast. There are vast open empty places. It was built for a maximum capacity of seven billion souls. Four and a half billion died on the day of impact. The ships infrastructure was wiped out. What remained were two billion sophisticated brains and a lot of creatures looking for a new home. The journey was immense, the space traversed vast, the time elapsed impossible for the DNA based soul capsules to comprehend or experience as individuals. Each day, each individual spacesuit clad soul’s experiences and observations were automatically uploaded to the higher place that people no longer knew in concrete terms. They had known before the impact. Theirs was an advanced ‘culture’, more advanced than any of the myriad of ‘created’ artificial cultures they used as templates after the tsunamis wiped out so many people that culture became related to a past so far away that no one was any longer sure of what premeditated current moors. A rock hurled by the hand of God—landing in Hudson Bay. Shortly before impact, another ship had taken off, on its way for a loop around a sun and no one knew for sure when it could come back. They were the chosen ones. The watchers of the horizon.