Afternoon on Zilly was passing by. For the first time in orbit, it was daylight and Eve had nothing to do. She sat in the cockpit, the room with the second-largest window, and gazed down at the planet’s surface. What war was going on down there? What monsters had evolved, with the sole intent of devouring one another, in the hours since the abominations from the lab had been collected? She wished now the Virgil had some sort of monitoring technology that would allow her to take a closer look at the surface. It did. She just didn’t have access to it. And to think that, just days before, she had truly thought herself the foremost person of importance on, or from, the planet Earth. It hit her now that she was in a vessel over which she operated no control. Her job was not to explore: it was to monitor. An A.I. could do that. Why didn’t the A.I. do that? Why was she there at all? The Virgil was perfectly capable of doing her job, and it didn’t demand a salary.
At any rate, she could only wonder about the ongoing turmoil on the surface. What did she know? She knew that Zilly was old. It was older than Earth by several billions of years. She knew that there were no signs of any previous types of life, or anything of any kind resembling the wormies. Was this the first time they had appeared on this ancient swamp? Had the drones failed to properly sterilize prior to entry, and brought with them some kind of contaminant? Had Virgil, and by extension Eve as the Monitor, ruined humanity’s chance of truly understanding the complex life cycle of an alien planet? All these conclusions were far too early to be made, she decided. After all, the dark side of Zilly had always, for the last sixteen years, wiped out any trace of its daily life. Given its ability to erase the past so entirely, maybe the planet had experienced countless introductions of new species. Maybe the next morning would bring a clean slate. Once the worm-infested side of the planet passed entirely into shadow, maybe everything would return to swampy normality. Normality. She should have stayed on Earth.
Eve was homesick. She didn’t know why, or even what for. There was nothing about Earth she missed, and nobody in particular. It was the sense of abandonment a college student feels after leaving a school she despised. It was the sense of loss after a distant, unloved relative dies. She didn’t like being out here. It was never quite real, and people gravitate towards the tangible.
* * * *
It was that night that she decided to try her luck re-entering the aft. She missed her pet cactus. For all she knew, the Virgil’s lockdown had flushed the plant right out into the cold. But at any rate the lockdown hadn’t ended yet, she was curious, and she’d been given override codes. Of course she had. That’s why she was here. The A.I. was still new. S.T.A.R.S. knew better than to give the Virgil total control of the mission. It was time Eve exercised her authority.
It was only a few minutes before she’d typed in the override commands and unlocked the aft. Readings were normal: it was safe for her to proceed inside. At least, as far as the air was concerned, it was safe. Upon physically entering the breached door, she was faced with a different reality. It was a jungle. The cactus, her pet plant which had been so small and fragile, was as big as the room. The window, her favorite opening to the mystery of the void, was blocked. The walls were covered in the heaving, brownish vines, each bristling with terrifying barbs. There were traces of frost throughout the room, and some of the extremities of the leafy vines were cracked, blackened, broken. The glance told Eve what had happened. The Virgil had locked down the room and, in order to remove the threat of the cactus, had attempted to eject it. But it had been too late. The vines had taken hold of the inner aft. Survival appeared to be a trademark of these reticent weeds, and even the A.I. couldn’t beat them.
But the Virgil hadn’t given up. The design of the ship was really magnificent, in that the drones were able to dock at openings with access to the air vents of any room. They had lifted the preserved worms – there were still hundreds of them after the battle of the lab – and dropped them through the vents of the aft. It was a seething, feasting horde she saw in front of her. The soily refuse of the worms was thickening on the floor, as the vermin grew fatter and fatter, larger and longer. For the first time in human history, Eve experienced a sight which was wholly otherworldly. Nothing recognizable remained within her frame of vision. For the first time, she admitted that she was frightened. She said it out loud to herself, and that was the worst sign of all.
Trusting in the Virgil, she shut the door to the aft and fled down the hall. She found herself stumbling toward the privy. It wasn’t a conscious knowledge that she needed to vomit, but her body knew better. Her mind knew what she’d seen, but her eyes, her organic receptacles and her fleshy brain, didn’t know what to do with the grotesque sight.
“I want to go to space.” She’d been lying. She had never really entertained the notion. Truth be told, she probably would have been happy working as a programmer for the rest of her natural life. Programming was numbers. It was cold and safe. Those words about space just seemed like the right thing to say to Drew, that night on the grassy hill. Grass. Clingy and wet. What if the Earth’s vegetation evolved to the level of ferocity it had achieved on Zilly? Eve didn’t really want to go back to Earth, now. She abhorred the very thought of stepping onto a ground filled with organic, seething life. The cold metal and comforting distance of Virgil’s A.I. was home, now. At least it couldn’t grow teeth before her eyes.