Book 2: Chapter 68: Recording
Jacques
September 2212
Delta Pavonis
Guppy popped into VR. [New memory core is online]
“Good. It was getting a little tight. Have the drones resume the full program.”
Guppy nodded and disappeared.
I had implemented a plan to record as much of the planet as I could before the Others got here. Not just Pav civilization, either. Plants, animals, scenery, geology, anything and everything I could think of. I built a standalone set of stasis chambers well in advance of the colony ships, and now I was slowly stocking it with genetic material from every species that I could get a needle into. A very informal and ad hoc genetic diversity vault, in essence. I had no overall organization, as I’d had no time to catalog and categorize the life on Delta Pavonis 4 into any kind of system. I was, in effect, stealing a strategy from Noah and treating everything as a “kind”. The recordings would help with identifying species and such later. If there was a later.
I was also recording Pav societies, cultures, and languages. Between all the spying and recording, my data storage requirements were massive. Guppy had just done the third upgrade since I’d started the project. I estimated there was at least one more upgrade coming.
I had played with the idea of contacting some Pav on the sly, perhaps to get a personal account of life. But Bill had convinced me that it would be cruel at best, and at worst, ghoulish.