“Normally, yes, but they had our course pre-charted. We basically didn’t even have to fly the ship. We were along for the ride, just like you, there in case anything happened during flight. We were just as oblivious as you, I promise,” one man said.
“It’s true,” said another.
“You don’t even understand just how bad this is going to be...” I trailed off. My mind was racing. “The plant life here on Circadia is very fragile. It is extremely fertile and grows at tremendous rates, but it also is very sensitive.”
“What the hell does that mean? I really don’t care about the plants right now, Aella.”
“No, you don’t get it. The plants, including our crops, will go dormant. We are going to be short on food and about to more than double our population.” I was frantic. “We have a good chance of starving. Even if the plants start to come back to life when the sun comes back, I don’t know if it will be soon enough.”
“What the fuck? What are we going to do?” he asked. “I thought we were supposed to be prepared for a possible shutdown?”
“We have been trying to prepare, but we haven’t had a lot of time, and we didn’t prepare for a shutdown with this many people!” I exclaimed.
“So, what are we going to do?” he asked.
“I don’t know. We need to go talk to the nutrition team right now. We need to start rationing immediately.”
THE NUTRITION TEAM and crew quickly got to work on the math of rationing safely for nine hundred people. Garrett and I watched as they looked at charts and went over numbers with calculators. When they started looking at each other without saying a word, I knew something was wrong.
“Gonna be tight, isn’t it?” I asked.
“It’s going to be worse than tight,” the lead nutritionist replied. “It’s going to be painful. There’s going to be unsafe rations, but I can’t see any other way.”
I closed my eyes and wished for an idea or solution that never came. When I opened them, I realized everyone was staring at me. “What?” I asked, confused.
“What should we do?”
“Whatever needs to be done.” I turned to walk away, begrudgingly. This was not what I wanted this place to be, but we had to do what we had to do. I thought I had grown in a positive way, but now everyone was looking to me for answers that I didn’t have. Couldn’t have. It was a nightmare.
BY THE TIME THE NEXT mealtime came around, everyone had already speculated that there would be food shortages. I heard talk about it circulating, but when people were handed their plates, I watched as their eyes bulged from their sockets. The amount of food that was placed on the plates was laughable. A tablespoon of corn, a few leafy greens, and two ounces of a protein shake made from soy powder. It was a terrible feeling to be hungry and to only have that much food to eat. For the next three days, I felt like I was starving. The food was just enough to sustain life and nothing else. The taste was not great, and the way it made my empty stomach feel was no better. Everything was left raw so that the most nutrients could be extracted by our bodies, but it still wasn’t enough. There was no energy, drive, or relief.
I watched the dark field as my crops shriveled and turned brown. The trees wilted and dried. My hopes of making this new planet great faded, along with my body. It was amazing what such little food could do to a human body in a couple days’ time. We had already been skimping on rations before the blackout, so our bodies were already rundown when the second cut came. My muscles shrank, and any fat storage I had was being used. We had no mirrors, but I could feel my face sinking in.
Luckily, it stayed warm enough that nothing froze, so we still had fresh water to drink. Dehydration was the last thing we needed, but even though I was grateful that the temperatures never dropped below freezing, I loathed the cold.
Garrett made it a habit to come to my hut every night to keep me warm. The company was nice, but the warmth was even better. I felt his bones press against mine and shake. The longer we went without food, the more prominent they were. What should have been comforting was more depressing than anything else. He told me over and over, ‘we are stronger than this’ and ‘we are going to make it through this, just wait.’ The words were about as comforting as the cuddling. Just echoed what I didn’t want to hear. After a while, he stopped saying things like that.
I wondered if he’d lost hope, but never asked.
ON THE FOURTH DAY, when the spacecraft carrying five hundred more people to feed was supposed to arrive, we waited by the supply hull just like the last time we received new arrivals. We were unsure who these people were, just like last time, but worse.
When the crews came, we had no idea who they were but we knew and they knew that they were coming here to work. It was a pre-trip agreed-upon understanding. With the new civilian pioneers, we had no idea what to expect. I thought they probably had no idea what to expect, either.
We waited in the dark continuous night until we saw a burst of light from above. With each pod that dropped, a bright light exploded into the sky until it burned out like a falling star and crashed to the surface. No one seemed to be excited or nervous like last time, and that worried me. The light that burned from the pods entering the atmosphere lit the grotesque faces of the people I had come to know, and it scared
