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Shannon got the joke.Robinson Crusoehad been one of her father’s favorite books, and it was a fitting name for a shipwrecked entity.
“How did you know my father?” she asked.
“It was Samuel who awakened me.”
“What do you mean?”
Something moved on the wall next to Shannon’s head, and she jerked back, but her fear quickly gave way to curiosity and a sense of awe. At first she thought she was looking at a painting, except it was made out of light instead of paint, and the level of detail was unlike any piece of art she’d ever seen.
The image was of a planet, and it reminded Shannon of her father’s old globe, which she still had on a table back at the ranch. But in the image on the wall, the land masses were shaped differently from the continents she was familiar with, and they were partly obscured by white swirls of cloud.
After a second, Shannon received another surprise as she realized the planet was slowly rotating.
A moving picture!
Shannon had heard of such a thing before. Thomas Edison was working on a device called a Kinetograph which could display moving images, but as far as Shannon knew, that device hadn’t been completed yet, and she was pretty sure it wouldn’t be as advanced as the thing she was looking at now.
As she watched, an object came flying up from the planet’s surface and seemed to move closer to her, growing larger and larger as it approached until it took up the entire space of the image. The front of the object was a sphere, just like the one she was standing inside of now, only it didn’t have any scrapes or holes on its metal surface. Behind the sphere was a much longer cone-shaped structure that appeared to be made out of the same material.
“Long ago,” Crusoe said, “the Masters ventured out among the stars in search of promising worlds where life was already beginning to take hold. They brought with them tools to assist the development of complex lifeforms—and to make adjustments where necessary so that the lifeforms could evolve in the Masters’ image. One of the worlds they discovered was Earth.
“Those skeletons in the other room,” Shannon said. “Were those… Masters?”
“Yes. Samuel wanted to take some of the bones away to study them, but I refused. When the other Masters come to salvage me, they will wish to have those bones, so they may be interred back on their homeworld.”
“How did they die?”
“The Masters came to this planet many times to observe the development of the lifeforms here, and to assist with their evolution. However, on the last journey, the ship’s hull was damaged, resulting in a fatal crash.”
The moving picture on the wall now showed the Masters’ vessel spinning out of control high above the Earth. Parts of the cone-shaped section were torn open, and a glowing golden substance was leaking out, raining down on the planet below. After a few seconds, most of the cone broke away entirely and went spinning off into the distance, spraying more of the yellow fluid as it went. Finally, the sphere crashed into the top of a mountain, and the remaining section of the cone ruptured, leaving several large pools of fluid around the crash site.
“While my ship was falling, it spilled fuel over a very large region of the Earth’s surface. Some of the fuel became deeply embedded within the planet’s crust, and over time, it became buried even deeper under layers of sediment. Gradually, the liquid fuel crystalized. That is the substance which you humans call firestone.”
“So that’s where firestone came from?” Tanner asked. “How come those formations outside are so big?”
“I believe the nearby firestone crystals’ growth was stimulated by exposure to solar radiation.”
“You mean we cangrowfirestone? God, a person could make a fortune off that.”
“The process takes a prohibitively long time.”
“What are we talking? Like a hundred years or something?”
“Longer than that, human. Significantly longer.”
“But you still haven’t explained what any of this has to do with my father,” Shannon jumped in. “You said he awakened you.”
“An approximate term. Reactivated would be more accurate. The exterior surface of my hull is able to absorb enough solar radiation to run the electronic systems. However, my mind shut down following the crash. A manual reactivation was required, but the crew were all dead, so I remained in a dormant state.”
“And nobody found you until my father came along?”
“I do not know for sure,” Crusoe said. “It is possible other individuals happened across me, but if they did, none of them had the courage or curiosity to enter. Not Samuel, though. He came in through an opening in my hull, the same way you did. During his explorations, he unwittingly flipped a switch that reset the ship’s systems. This brought my electronic mind back online. Unfortunately, it had other, more far-reaching effects.”
“What do you mean?”
The screen on the wall switched to an image a monkey, but Shannon didn’t recognize the species. The view zoomed in until individual cells were visible, then strange X-shaped structures Shannon couldn’t identify. Finally the view zoomed in further still, showing something that looked like a twisted-up ladder.
“When the Masters built me, they equipped me with tools for making adjustments to the development of life on new worlds. The goal was to guide the process of evolution to give rise to new species in the Masters’ image. Humans are one such species. Your genetic ancestors were arboreal primates. They had opposable thumbs for grasping branches and forward facing eyes for better depth perception while moving through the trees. In humans, these adaptations were repurposed for the manipulation of increasingly complex tools, which led to increasingly complex civilizations. On other worlds, the path to the Masters’ image followed a different course, but in every case, some gentle nudging was required, and that is where my devices came in.”
