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Expedition to a Life-Bearing Moon
(2021, Excerpt)
My feelings of panic have subsided and I have calmed down somewhat. Perhaps now I can give a more accurate description of my crash.
I was orbiting the moon, and had just been given the go-ahead to land by the satellite. My ship was on target, descending into the atmosphere, when very suddenly something gave. With little time to think, I turned on manual control. The ship was veering off course and heading for the ground at a dangerous pitch so I tried to right it and land but careened into a dense patch of forest instead (I am no pilot).
It is thanks to modern spacecraft engineering––and no doubt a great deal of luck––that I am still alive. When I came to in the burning wreck I panicked and fled, leaving my patches behind. Thinking only of my equipment, I ran to the cargo hold where I found most of it ruined. I salvaged what I could and set up a makeshift camp away from the blaze.
The crash should have triggered an automatic distress beacon, that is, if ship communications were not destroyed first. Since I have only a radio and nothing for intersystem communication, I have to trust they dispatched a rescue team, which, if it left immediately, would arrive in roughly six years.
Once I thought to look through a medical kit I had saved, I found four backup patches. It is not enough, but it is something to work with. I have already applied one, and plan to use them intermittently, so as to spread out the dose.
Since I have the protector gene, if I fail to get enough medicine, my body will launch a hormonal process that could leave me permanently disfigured, physically and cognitively.
It was a great adaptation for our ancestors. They lived in a wild, tumultuous world, full of raging storms and great beasts hungry for little Drogans. So some had to adapt, sacrificing brain for brawn to protect the rest. Then there came a time when we quieted the storms, killed the beasts, and created a world of peace in that little band of Androga we now call home. And in this new world, they no longer needed us.
We very nearly died out, cast away from the others to the very edges, to the land of shivering twilight, but eventually they found a cure, a medicine that would suppress the gene, and at long last, they brought us back in. They say that some remained, continued life in the old way, but I do not know if it is true. Now, save for the little patches on our necks, and the constant fear of transformation, we are no different from the rest. In fact we are so well incorporated into the gene pool that any infant in the tanks could emerge with that vestigial gene, just as I did, 1,536 years ago.
