Morning all. Stuffy and drugged with antihistamines this morning so that should make the morning prompt interesting. Let’s set those timers and find out.
Apparently I get fatalistic on antihistamines. Good to know I suppose.
Friday, December 13th: Flash floods carved deep channels in the dirt.
Flash floods carved deep channels in the dirt. The area went from looking like an arid desert to a swampland criss-crossed with rivers in a matter of days. It was a transformation that no one expected and no one was prepared for. In earlier surveys there was evidence that this section of the planet had a wet season but somehow no one thought it would be this intense. No matter how many times the survey crews came, it was always in the dry season.
Alec looked at the reports and wondered, not for the first time, how hard they tried to identify the wet season and it’s repercussions before they decided to settle his team here. All of the gear they were left with was designed for water conservation and the management of a scares resource. While it had been useful in the first month of their arrival, the equipment was now not only useless but much of it had taken damage from the onslaught of the rains.
They were, quite simply, not prepared for it.
When he tried to radio for supplies he found the connection broken. No one was responding. In the absence of orders he made judgement calls. Most of the others assumed the calls were orders and that help was on the way. Alec knew they needed to believe that. He needed to believe that. To feel like he was just holding on until he could reach someone. Yet he kept trying and kept getting the same nothingness back.
He knew that to keep trying verged on the definition of insanity but to let go of that hope would be to admit, if only to himself, that they were cast out here and left to either survive of die on their own. He wasn’t ready to believe that. And so he made his best calls. He spent his nights researching any available resources to figure out how best to manage the situation. Then after a the minimum of sleep he needed to function he was up again, plan in hand and pushing the team forward. It was working. They were managing the water influx in a way that he hoped would help them out when water again became a scarce commodity.
He read the reports and tried to put together a time line. Throughout it all he hoped that the reports were real and not simply made up to fill in the gaps. He knew that the last of the survey teams were rushed and that there was the all too human tendency to fill in the gaps when time didn’t allow a full study. The corporation running the settlement and relocation plans tended to encourage that tendency as well. They wanted no incomplete reports on their records, even if half of the information was fictional.
‘Or best guess,’ he thought as he once again tried to raise a response on the communications system. He should know. He spent years working for the corporation before ending up here. Ending up here wasn’t exactly a reward for meritorious service. So he had little faith in the reports, but like the communications system, he wasn’t ready to give it up.
He spoke clearly into the microphone sending his voice across the cosmos. He waited for a response. When enough time passed he repeated his message. As was his custom he would try three times before letting the system settle. While the bulk of it would power down it would still be in a receiving mode and activate should a response later come in. His second attempt garnered no response. He waited and tried a third time. This time, the airwaves crackled with a return message.
Ten til Midnight 