The Forgotten World -

This blog is going to track the story of Raj Lehman and the early colony on Idyll after the Calamity. Here is the first installment!

The Day After

Raj Lehman, a botanist, a man who loved flowers and was fascinated by growing things, things that did not speak or need to be led, now found himself the leader of the last remnants of humanity on the distant plant Idyll. The planet, which had indeed matched its name for the four years he had lived there at the edge of colonized space, now was a sort of hell.

He pulled himself away from his desk and the blank screen staring at him. There was nothing to see. All communications were gone. He checked every 30 minutes or so now, up from every 30 seconds yesterday.

Walking outside his home, which now was the refuge and headquarters for all of humanity, he looked for his wife Anna amid the dozens of people camped nearby in hopes of hearing something positive. He did not find her, but he did see a face among the milling people he recognized from the mining settlement.

"Thank God you made it," Raj said, smiling at Irina Berntz, the lanky former spacer who managed Idyll's only mine. "I prayed that you folks would be outside of the blast radius. Are there others?"

His friend tried to smile at seeing him but her lips couldn't quite form it. "Most of us at the mine made it. The ones that didn't, well, they were on their way to Lakeside when it happened."

Raj nodded. Anything within 30 kilometers of their former primary settlement would have been killed by the massive nuclear blast. Now, only the diaspora that had been in various resource camps and small settlements must remain.

She pointed over to a collection of people near the outskirts of the farm encampment to show the miners. There were perhaps 30 people. Some were clearly dressed in mining gear and outfits. Others were family, their desolate faces matching those already here at the farm.

"We are setting up more tents. We are lucky we still have some from the original landing in storage. We had planned to repurpose them soon. It might be about the only slice of luck we have had so far," he said to Berntz, whom he had met in the final month of their 125-year transit from the Sol system to Idyll.

"Thankful to be 'ere," she said, solemnly. "Do we know much?"

"Only speculation," Raj said. "They had been trying to retrofit one of the shuttles to use a fission reaction instead of fusion because the magnetic containment system had failed and it required a part we didn't have. We assume there was an accident and it set off other reactions. It was a huge explosion. Maybe the biggest human-made bomb ever. "

She nodded. "We thought the same. Are you runnin' the show 'ere now?" she said in her funky space-born accent.

"Until we can get our shit together and vote in some kind of government, yes. It's mostly from expediency since I was running the farm," he said.

"Well, now, we need food 'lot more'n anything else," she said. "It's alright. I tell my folks to listen. I don't think this lot will fight ya much."

Raj tried not to feel sorry for himself, considering he had lived through the calamity that had killed nearly 7,000 people. But the situation seemed unduly unfair. The main settlement that remained after the explosion was a glorified farm. As recently as a few months ago, there was a six hectare greenhouse covering the ground that could have provided shelter and food for everyone. They had removed it as their hybrid Earth-Idyll plants were now thriving.

Now there remained a cluster of houses and rows and rows of plants stretching across a region that had been set aside for agriculture.

Raj did not consider himself a leader. He was a smart ass. He made fun of leaders. He liked plants and dad jokes. Now the few hundred surviving humans on this planet were relying on him.

All of it would have been horrifying and hard in any situation, but the fact that no help from Earth would likely ever come made it too cruel. Earth had stopped sending messages and ships more than 100 years ago. That horror had been the chief subject of speculation since he arrived four years ago, but it had now been summarily displaced by their new impossible situation.

Raj said goodbye to Irina and tried again to find his wife, Anna, another biologist, who was now acting as a medic, using one of their very few diagnostic tools to detect radiation sickness.

One of the farmhands hustled over to him carrying a box. He was one of the younger guys, Alec or Andrew or something?

"Hey, um, Mr. Lehman," he said awkwardly.

"Yeah - just call me Raj," he said, hating his unwanted leadership role.

"I found a scout drone in storage and I was thinking we could fly it to, uh, Lakeside, to, you know, see," he said.

For the first time in a day, Raj smiled.

"Awesome find, uh, Alec," Raj said.

The young man coughed. "It's Adam."

Dammit, Raj thought.