Kronos
“The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved [..], for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, in so much that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.”
– Plutarch, Theseus
- CE: 2164
Standing on the dazzling white lunar surface, Kronos gazed up with tender eyes at distant Mother Earth. Orbiting silently, eternally, from the deep cold of space he sensed her raging fires, the agony of her death throes. Processing around his Goddess, his mother, his Gaia, Kronos was alone.
He looked back down to see the last ship launch, weirdly silent, from the barren surface. A plume of regolith dust ballooned up and out in slow motion. Suddenly filled with tears, he reminded himself there was still hope, there was still the possibility that one of these ships carrying the seeds of a new human race would take root somewhere out there. Perhaps many! The sleek, silver vessel approached the worm-hole gate and just like all those that had gone before, glittered with shards of blue-purple light as it stretched into the huge maw and vanished.
“Goodbye and good luck, my little ones!”
His solitude hurt the most when his hope was at its strongest.
Turning his face once more towards the distant Earth he was again moved. These tears were much older, much darker, for there his mother Gaia lay in ruination. His sensory system could take it all in, all the data from every bit of the stricken planet. Fires and floods, nuclear winter, devastation and chaos in all parts. The remnants of the race traumatised and in mourning for all the species that had been lost. The DNA banks that Kronos harboured held the yearning promise of a return for feathers and fur, for fins and scales, for the gossamer wings of the dearly departed, for love and life lost.
Moved as he was, it was still nice to be back in anthropoid form for a while. There was really no need but he was sentimental like that. He thought it fitting to wave goodbye with an actual hand and arm.
He had always loved bringing a tranche of people out of stasis and readying them for their voyages. He had always hated the wrenching feeling of loss each time they left, never to be seen again. Thirty years of launches and now the first phase was complete. The grand plan to save the world would now have to pause.
He had calculated that the first reports back would be in at least nine hundred years. It was because of this immense timescale that they had named the mighty AI ‘Kronos’ - after all he was, in a sense, one of Gaia’s Titan sons and also, a near immortal.
With giant, bouncing strides in the low gravity, Kronos returned to Apollo Station and began to ready himself for entering stasis. He gathered into himself. Kronos waited.