Ok, I'm gonna start this off with a little author side note kind of thing. So this story will be told from multiple perspectives, each chapter being a specific character's view on the world. It also contains a number which will be the year the chapter is occurring in. This chapter's character perspective is "Chaoshi Wang" and it is the year 6102. Thanks for reading!
A far distant crashing could always be heard. The ever filling sea raged on for what seemed an eternity. Above, one could hear the rain hitting the surface of the ocean. The lonely call of some aquatic creature would echo through the stainless steel halls of the underwater human containment unit. Loud silence. White noise. It never stops. For the past few hundreds of years it has been raining. No sun had ever shown and no stars could ever be seen. Only the dark, brooding rain clouds and occasional bursts of electric blue lightning filled the sky. It seemed like the sky had been crying ever since humans came to live here. And it doesn't seem like it's ever going to stop.
I haven't seen the Sun ever since I arrived five years ago. But being completely honest, I don't really miss the Sun. Not that it would be the Sun that I see, this isn't Earth after all. I came here as part of a mission to colonize planet Aquain-437, with many other people. I was a part of the third group sent here, and it wasn't so bad at the time. Growing up in China, Earth, my life was quite simple. I was a skyline taxi driver who drove people on the air way. It was an easy job, and it paid decently, but my life was getting boring. I knew that there have been missions to travel across the universe to colonize new worlds, so I applied to go to one. Earth at the time seemed like it was dying again anyway and I wanted to escape such a fate. Soon after I applied I got a call asking if I wanted to go on the Aquain-437 colonization mission. For a life changing decision, I made it fairly quick, as I was getting sick and tired of the life I was living. I felt it necessary to start over, so I left.
6087 was the year I left. I was told that the journey would take 10 years. Imagine 10 years of hypersleep, 10 years of your life pass by in what seems to be less than a second. For you to close your eyes for only a second and wake up a decade later on some foreign world where you would spend the rest of your days. Imagine doing all that, then calling home and being told that your whole family died in a horrible accident the day you left. And imagine how cold and emotionless one can become after hearing such horrible news. That's who I am now.
Originally, Aquain-437 was a tundra planet. 97 percent of the surface was covered in thick ice, almost 10 miles deep. Colonizers scanned the surface for a place to settle down and begin the operation to terraform Aquain-437 into a paradise made for humanity. The thinnest part of the ice was about two miles thick, so the first colonizers melted the area around this part. But when the ice melted away, gas escaped and the surface across the planet cracked and crumbled releasing more gas. The atmosphere thickened and as the colonists built their new home, flood after flood of water came and a new design had to be made to fit the planets rapidly changing terrain.
After nearly 600 years, the colony began to poke out of the two mile deep sea and a new group of colonists could be received. After the second group arrived at the ocean once again grew and the city fell deeper and deeper into the depths of Aquain-437's sea. For another 600 hundred years humans built their colony up as the sea began to rise. The colony sank more than a mile down and it became almost four miles underwater. As the people built it once again reached out of the ocean's grasp and humanity could once again breathe. And that's when I arrived, but oddly enough the sea stayed at a relatively constant rate.
As I drag my fingers across the cold stainless steel walls of my assigned apartment building room, I think to myself that living here on Aquian-437 in the colony isn't that bad either, although it can get a little boring (which is the reason I left). But other than that I am semi-satisfied with the way I've been living, it is a new experience that I couldn't get anywhere else. Never could I ever have experienced the beautiful, deep, empty blue that fills each and every single window, or the soft, yet loud, lonely echoes of the Aquarian Gigawhale. It truly is magnificent to live here.
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