Is there life out there?
What with Roswell, Area 51 and reports from pilots, astronauts, police officers and thousands of ordinary people, the answer might just be – maybe.
For Corporal Jan Fintry of the Ghartian infantry serving in the front line against the Larillion army, he neither knows nor cares about the possibility of little green (or any other colour) beings in flying saucers, cups or even plates!
As he stared out across the icy waste that was the no-man’s-land between the entrenched positions of both armies, it would be fair to say that very few men on the planet Thurion had ever considered the question.
He, and all his comrades would have been surprised to ascertain that their presence on this icy planet was not an accident of genetics, or evolution, or even of creation, but a deliberate act by ancient academics of an advanced race conducting an experiment. Jan and all his predecessors were the descendants of a small group of humans taken from Earth at the time of the Great Ice Age, many millennia ago.
Those responsible for the act had long since died, but their descendants had problems of their own, and the discovery of Thurion and the embattled occupants posed a potential answer to their own peculiar problem.
Their problem was that their race was dying. It was not dying from disease or war, but of complacency and boredom. They had long since removed the need to procreate by physical contact, so genders were a thing of the past. They had lost war, competition, and aggression. They had achieved a level of knowledge, science, technology and medicine that Humans might simply gasp in wonder. Their mental powers knew few bounds, and yet they were dying.
They were so comfortable that they had lost all drive to do anything but simply exist. The few that cared enough to do something realised that a catalyst was urgently needed to give them back what they’d lost.
That catalyst needed to be tested – where better than on Thurion.
Thurion – a planet with only one inhabited continent with a population sharing a common language and lineage, but had polarised into two factions that had been embroiled in a state of war that had been lasting two centuries and showed no sign of abating. Their culture was equally stagnant as their own, but for entirely different factors. A society that revered women, and yet refused them any form of equality with men in the management of daily life, except for the more mundane home matters. A planet that was only now coming out of the ice age and yet socially was
The catalyst – a highly intelligent and technically brilliant engineer called Douglas Wright – a human male who is past is sell-by date. Diagnosed as suffering from the latter stages of terminal cancer, Douglas sits by a pond near his home and weeps for a life lost. Briefly he meets an attractive young woman who hands him an envelope and promptly disappears.
Realising that for a man of Douglas’ skills and experience, on Thurion he would soon become like a one-eyed man in the Kingdom of the Blind – a king. This would not address their own problem. They reasoned that the catalyst needed a challenge to be truly tested and put under pressure.
Moments later, the man called Douglas died and a young woman with no memory awakened – stark naked in a snow drift in no-man’s land’ - in the sights of Corporal Jan Fintry’s rifle – a very long way away from planet Earth.
The Catalyst had arrived.