The LOST Prequel - A Story of Black and White
Chapter 1: What's the island?
How many years did it take for human being to evolve from primitive homo-sapiens to modern civilized intelligent people? About 200,000 years. How long did it take us to develop from beginning of farming to today's computerize modern society? About 10,000 years. Now imagine a highly intelligent alien specie from millions of light-years away which have a history of more than 5 million years. They have developed an unimaginable advanced level of technology, the kind of technology that we human can't even dream of. Over the course of their history, they have colonized millions of planets, finished tens of thousands of wars among themselves, and countless technology breakthroughs that took their knowledge to a new height. To us they are like gods. Each of them can create a solar system in 7 days, and destroy it in a blink of eyes. They have answers for all the mysteries of universe, except one.
There is a question that had been vexing them for millions of years, since the beginning of their civilization.
Is there another intelligent specie living out there in a planet, just like them?
To find the answer, they have sent millions of space ships out, combing their entire galaxy one planet at a time. Their space-time traveling technology allows them to shorten the traveling time to a minimum. In one flash, their ships can jump from one end of the galaxy to the other end of it. In another flash, their ship can finish analyzing the whole star system to draw a result, determining that if there is any sights of intelligent beings exists in this whole system. You cannot even call those things "ships" because it was nothing like a ship. If one of them stays in a space and time long enough, all you can see was a large globe of yellow lights, then the lights turn off and it disappears into another time and space. With this kind of technology, they were confident that it was a matter of "time" that they would find a planet thriving with lives, just like theirs.
Five million years have passed. To their surprise, they found nothing. It was not because of the time, it was because of the number. The universe has an infinitely number of planets and stars, but the ones that can support life must fit many critical criteria, which make the chance astronomically small. On top of that, the chances of that planet developed intelligent lives capable of civilization are much smaller. Additionally, those intelligent lives also have a tendency of self-destruction. They will appear in a planet for 100,000 years, but next time you visit them. They'll all extinct for various reasons. All those factors made the search very difficult.
They have searched thousands of billions of star systems, but there still billions of billion star systems left. Worse of all, they also found out that there were infinite number of parallel universes exist. Each universe has a slight different version of their civilization in them, but none of those civilizations found anything. Now they have to search all those parallel universes as well. The odds are against them.
After million years of searching, they grew desperate. An important decision was made. No longer will they send space ships with crews onboard to search in a coordinated grid like fashion. Instead, they massively produce space probes that jump through space and time and universes randomly, and fill the sky with billion billions of these probes. They believed that as long as they keep mass producing them, the universe will be filled up by those probes, eventually when the number is great enough, one day a probe will find what they are looking for. It was the only way to balance the odds.
Each space probe was equipped with a basic Tasillium core, a material only they can make, which is a complicated organic material made of manufactured atoms part like Titanium, and part like Silicon. The material is virtually indestructible, but at the same time it can think, and it can exert enormous power to do things that, to us human beings, nothing short of miracle. You can put the core in the surface of a star, it won't sweat a bit. You can throw it into a black hole, it will just go through it and come out in another parallel universe. The aliens think of them as a primitive but functional tool, like we human think of a toy, nothing special, but to us human beings, they were incredibly advanced.
The instruction of each probe was fairly simple: find a planet that has naturally developed intelligent lives, and report to the base. They didn't fit it with much technology, or made them too smart. As we all know, when you massively produce something, you want to keep the cost to a minimum. It was true even for such an advanced alien specie like them.
Away they went out for the mission. Gradually countless space probes spread to all the neighboring galaxies.
The new strategy worked. Roughly 65 million years ago, one of the probes had finally reached the solar system, our solar system. Within a second, it found earth and her complicated life forms. It found dinosaurs and the dinosaurs' complicated civilization. It was supposed to be a time of celebration. After all, a search over 6 million years had finally reached the fruit. The probe was so excited and proud and filled with all kind of alien emotions that we not yet able to experience. It decided to wait a second to report. It wants to take this single second to enjoy its discovery, to find out how beautiful the new planet was, to see all the lives that were living in this amazing new world, just by itself, alone.
All highly developed beings are selfish, even a space probe was the same. It was just this selfish decision, and that extra second, had made a huge difference of the history of the earth.
Another space probe popped into exactly the same space as the excited probe. It just went through a super nova. Though there were little damage, it had went through hell and was super-heated and going at a super-speed. All its memory was temporary lost, and it was supposed to stay somewhere to heal. It was hard to believe that after so many million years of searching, two probes showed up in the solar system at almost exactly the same time, and unfortunately at exactly the same space. What were the odds of it? The number was so mind-boggling small that it made the lottery look like a sure win. But hey, as someone says, what happened, happens.
The late comer caused a catastrophe effect on the former one. The Tisillium is indestructible. So the only thing that can destroy Tisillium is Tisillium itself. When the Tisillium core of second probe suddenly appeared inside the first probe's core, a chain-reaction of nuclear fission took place immediately. The power was so great that it darken the sun, push Jupiter out of its orbit and stop planet Mars's iron core from spinning. Earth was in the other side of orbit, so the effect of the explosion was at a minimum. After a long while, like the T-1000 in the movie Terminator 2, the remaining pieces of Tisillium started to cluster together, now no bigger than a truck, mostly consists of the late comer, who lost most of its memory before the atomic fission. Could not figure out who it was and what it was supposed to do. A few atoms from the first probe reminded it that the target was the earth. So without much thinking (or not capable of thinking), the new stupid probe hit the earth like a bullet.
We all know that disaster took place 65 million years ago. It ends the domination of the dinosaurs and many other species. What we don't know is that the meteor was not six miles wide. In fact, it was merely as big as a SUV, look like a yellow bright globe, which obviously lost its mind.
Sadly, this globe was much more deadly than a 6-mile iron meteor.
The impact had raised inferno all through half of the earth. Thick dust covered the sky globally for a thousand years. Most water was frozen into ice under the nuclear-winter like atmosphere. Earth was plummeted into a lifeless icy cold planet. While her sister, Mars, without her magnetic field, was gradually stripped off the atmosphere and all the water due to the solar wind.
Solar system has lost her jewels. Billions of years of development lost in a matter of few years. All species on earth died in that disaster, not 50 percent, as today's archaeologists say.
So you see, everybody died, even the earth did, too. We all should not have existed at all. I don't know it should be counted as lucky or unlucky, because the story doesn't end here. The merged twin core of Tisillium played an important part of it.
The memory started to come back. The newly form Tisillium core realized what a big mistake it had made. Now he was in a dilemma. If he kept the planet as the way it was, and reported the incident to the base, saying," Hi, guys, I got good news and bad news. Good news is that I found what you have been looking for in the last 6 million years. Bad news is that I killed them all." He would surely be terminated immediately. If he revived the planet lives and reports to the base. Soon enough his masters would find out that all lives on earth was "remanufactured", and he would be dead too. He only had two choices. Fly away and leave the earth in death cold, pretending nothing have ever happened, or remanufacture the lives and hide somewhere so no other probes will find him.
Obviously even a space probe had a conscience, and some responsibility. He started to rebuild life on earth. It was time to be God, and he was a lousy one. He hated the vicious dinosaurs, except the beautiful flying ones. He loves the cute little mouse in the ground. So when he remade lives, he purposely ignored the dinosaur remains. All it took was seven earth years. When he finished the work, he looked at a new earth with grass, flowers and little rats running around, and he was satisfied.
It was time for him to hide. The safest place, of course, was as far away from earth as possible. However, he found out that he couldn't leave earth behind. All those creatures were his making. Even thought they were not officially naturally born, they were like his children and he couldn't abandon them. He was the father of the earth, his family was here. He couldn't run away, instead he decided to hide in earth. He figured that if his masters found out what he did and terminated him, at least he had done enjoying seeing his children grew.
So he used strong electro-magnetic field to glue rocks to his body, until he became an island. Then he seperated himself into 9 Tisillium cores, and scattered them to different spots in the island. It was a design to save power, otherwise a single core would have to use much stronger electro-magnetic field to pull the whole island together. The biggest core store most of the energy, and was placed inside a cave with a water fall.
Before imposing as an island, he already flied to the Sun and fully charged there. As a fake island, he couldn't charge anymore, but it would be safe from the detection of other probes. He planned to recharge every million years. So after 1 million years, he would dump the rocks, fly up to the Sun and recharge again. To us humans, it was like a submarine have to surface from time to time.
In order to better avoid other probe's detection, he would drift from one area to another. All magnetic electronic waves would be blocked; time-space shield would be placed on the edge of the island so even earth lives would have a hard time finding him.
After all was done. He was contented and happy to be another "lost" probe. The only thing he feared was that some other probe found him and report the earth's coordinate back to the base. That will be the certain early end of him.
Little that he knew, his mother planets and all the super advanced civilizations were destroyed in an unprecedented scale of inter-galactic war. All probes were recalled and were rebuilt as weapons, except him. No probe or alien would come and kill him anyway.
63 million years have passed.