Peridot reporting in. Day… I don't know what day it is. The silence is overbearing.
For a while, it used to be so… Loud. Small creatures humming, buzzing about, the wind hissing as it blew through the vegetation, now, I feel almost deaf to it. It feels like I've… Gotten used to it. I guess I could count that as a blessing, but ultimately it just feels slightly violating.
I don't want to be used to this rock! The very concept that, that this backwater slagheap is getting to me, is making its mark on me, it's terrifying. What's going to separate me from them? Here I am, stranded on a planet, my tech very much nonfunctional at best, trying to cope with the fact that almost everything here is alive, or has some form of life on it! I've gotten to the point where I've disabled my optical sensors.
For a while, I thought that Earth was glowing, I figured that bioluminescence was the case, but, as it turns out, that was merely my detector for non-silicon-based life showing… Everything. Now, the vegetation, which previously almost burned to look at, is just… It's just green. Vegetation. Flora. Fauna. Lifeforms so primitive and archaic, inefficient in the way they process energy. How did the Gems let them live?
Inefficient, irrational. But still alive, not extinct. I've read the tests, pored over every detail of every thesis developed back during our early colonial period, back when carbon-life was still somewhat around in Homeworld-space. Creatures much powerful, much stronger than anything on earth, creatures that were craftier, better adapted, all were wiped out before or after Gem contact. What makes Earth special? Most of the time, we didn't even need to send in ground troops or shock-Pearls, as whatever sentient life that could pose a threat, or resistance, merely wiped itself out over a few thousand years. What makes me sick, what worries me, is that the usual waiting period probably wouldn't do anything to earth.
Judging by the patterns of erosion in the rock formations, small traces, footprints of long-dead creatures, life has been around here for hundreds of thousands of years, just as strongly as it is today, regardless of carbon-organisms ridiculously small lifespan.
It's almost like those bizarre fiction tales that new Gems read, in order to process morals in a simplistic, abstracted way. 'Growing, expanding, refusing to die, read on in horror as Carbon-life seems to grow across even the Dataslate!'
Haha, ah, I miss those. I'm glad I have my recorder at least. Hearing my own voice keeps me sane, for a certain definition of the word, at least. Anyways, I must keep walking. As I've oriented myself properly using maps I've downloaded off the ship, I have to keep walking to the last known location of the Crystal Gems. It'll be slow, but, I'll be there eventually, and then I'll…
I don't know. They might… I…
Hmm. I do have a plan. Not sure what it is, yet, but plans do take time.
Peridot, signing out.