Log Entry 1
02 April 3058
Pre-Landing
I'm fucked.
That's the reality of the situation.
I'm looking at this planet in advance of the landing and taking stock of everything I have right now. I've been given a small crafting station, an exosuit, and a multitool. The planet below me doesn't even have a name. It's a barren beige piece of shit and my job is to turn it into into a new Earth.
For the record, I know these logs don't get read by anyone but Sentinel Corp. Not even sure what they do with them. Maybe they archive them for future use. 'Your sentence will be recorded for training purposes' or something like that. They probably just wipe the logs. Either way I'm not doing this for them. I'm doing it because I'm probably going to be the only voice I hear for the next...I dunno, however long this takes. It'll be a way of keeping me sane.
So...I guess I should start at the beginning. I am Convict GP-B971-L, which translated from Sentinel Corp's jargon means my name is Asher Walsh, and it means that I'm fucked. Why am I fucked? Because I screwed up.
I can try and argue how I didn't deserve to be convicted. I mean, I did it. I screwed up, I mislabeled the timetables, and two ships tried going through the Winnarak Secunda Warp Gate at the same time. Now there's pieces of them scattered for eight parsecs in five directions. But when I have to go about running eighteen hour shifts on the warp gates just because half the staff come down with septapox, Sentinel Corp shouldn't be blaming me for losing focus.
So yeah. I could argue why I shouldn't have been convicted. I tried. It didn't work.
Normally they'd just space me, but I was lucky. For a given definition of it. They pointed out that I had passed the geoengineering courses at university with flying colors. I should have been working in terraforming from the start, but how could I turn up the benefits from working on a Warp Gate? They gave me the offer. I could die quickly, or die slowly. And I chose to die slowly, because I'm stupid.
Well, "chose". They were way more insistent I go about becoming a Planet Crafter for some reason. Normally it takes a week or so to assign someone a planet to work on, it took them all of half an hour to assign me to this one. Exactly why, I don't know. It's out in the ass-end of the Izitial Prime sector, doesn't even have a name, doesn't even have a designation. So I'll give it one. Planet Steve. It's my job to make Steve a decent place to live.
If you're curious as to what it is a Planet Crafter does, think "community service: extreme edition". We're given some basic materials and told to start the process of terraforming a planet. If you're still curious, the success rate of Planet Crafters is about 0.5%. They doll it up as much as they can, saying "if you succeed your charges are cleared" and pointing out how the people who succeed go on to grand and prosperous lives. I can count everyone who's succeeded on one hand.
Terraforming isn't the worst thing in the world. There are established ways of going about things, materials that work, mechanisms that you can use. And luckily, they bothered to give me a multitool, which is something most Planet Crafters don't get. So that was nice of them I guess. And people have single-handedly terraformed planets before. They just tend to be the eccentric trillionaires who have the time and resources to put towards it. Usually whenever that happens it turns into some kind of a nightmarish personality cult when people actually settle there. Turns out making an entire planet habitable can give you a god complex, who'd have thought?
The few resources I have at my disposal are basic things. I have one chest, full of food and water. Then there's my crafting station. It's useful for making some basic materials I'll need to not die, things like air tanks or exoskeletons for added equipment. My exosuit itself is basic too, an airtank that will last me an hour at most but the material is durable. As a bonus it helps me recycle water, though I don't enjoy the idea of drinking my sweat and piss even if it gets distilled and purified in the process.
If I am going to stay alive, then it's my multitool that'll be the most responsible for it. Marvelous little thing, able to scan and store materials. I just point and it sucks up a whole chunk of iron almost like a vacuum. The miracles of modern science. If I lose this thing, or if it breaks, then there's nothing left. It would be faster to walk outside and take off my helmet, which is always an option anyways. I live or die by this thing.
I've gone over my supplies again and again. I have food and water for about thirty days. Beyond that I need to source my own food, on a planet where nothing grows. This landing pod provides minimal life support, so I need to figure out how to get some kind of a base going with only the resources I find on the surface. And I don't even know what resources are on the surface, they're sending me down almost completely blind.
That's the beauty of being a Planet Crafter. If you fail you're dead, but you were dead anyways. If you succeed there's a whole new planet ready for settlement and people think you're a hero. The galaxy is only so big and there are only so many naturally habitable planets. So you make more. Either way, Sentinel Corp gets what they want.
This planet is officially classed at a TerraIndex of 0. Big fat goose egg. The atmosphere is so thin it might as well not be there. No water on the surface, so I'd better hope I can find ice. The surface is 200 Kelvin, which is a bracing -73 Celsius for anyone who is or isn't listening. Even with my exosuit I'm going to be shivering if I spend too much time in the shade. And obviously no life. Zip. Zilch. Not a single green thing on the entire planet. They presented to me as a "blank canvas" that I could "make my mark on". Right now the most of a mark I could make is if I get hit by a meteor and turn into a thin red stain on the surface.
If I can't get an oxygen source going I'll suffocate. If I can't find water I'll die of thirst. If my exosuit rips I'll explode. And if nothing else goes wrong, eventually I'll run out of food. I have no way to talk to anyone, no means of sending or receiving messages, and even if I did I'm not allowed to. If nothing else goes wrong, I'm going to be alone on a barren, desolate planet, for more than likely a few years. And because I'm a convict no one cares unless I succeed.
So yeah. I'm fucked.
- - - LANDING SEQUENCE COMMENCED - - -
