“Your body is your temple. Plunder it.”
Three pieces of good news.
One: He was smarter than the people who had sent him here. And there was no way in hell that he was going to U-turn around into a suicide mission.
Two: The planet that read as habitable actually was habitable.
Three: The people who sent him on this wild flight to meddle with the course of history had sent along all kinds of laboratory equipment and information in order to deal with every situation.
Including a clone lab and brain-pattern recorder.
The bad news? He was the only genetic sample.
The really bad news? Earth was calling to find out what had gone wrong with the mission.
He sabotaged his ship enough to make it look like he’d crashed and failed and set to work. He had a world to build. Starting with a small community made of him.
And the ultimate bad news… all the protein on this planet was toxic.
Which meant he had to eat cultured tissue. And he was the only genetic sample that he had.
*
“We eat of the Allfather and remember. We owe our existence to one monumental act of unlistening, unrelenting, wilful ignorance.”
“Think all things through,” said the clones. Almost-clones. The Alllfather had done his best with what he had, but genetic variance could only go so far. All of them, women and men, could not breed in what other cogniscents call the ‘traditional way’.
“And remember, also, the words we are to deliver to the Unthinkers.”
Now the multitude at the remembrance ceremony shouted at the top of their lungs, “ERICH VON DÄNIKEN CAN SUCK IT!”
“Three thousand years ago, the Allfather was sent out to create a better world. He knew that the Unthinkers sent him to his death.”
The ministers at the grill began to hand out sliders to the multitude with, “Flesh of the Allfather…”
“When they come to ask of their better world we shall say unto them,”
They all chorused, “We made it here.”
Revenge, as they say, is a dish best served cold. For Adam Fydeus, that revenge was about to be served at below zero degrees Kelvin.
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