111 - Petra Lainz's Journal Entry

########## :Data entry: Chishiki year after landing... 78######## bugs in the ###### ###damn cheap code for ##### lowest bidder software light years away from the complaints office #### all it does is cause mutations, most of which are le##thal ### ### Perry’s killed us all, ## he thinks. ### this journal.###

Dagdovha stopped sifting through the odd bits of data, didn’t notice when a blue and silver crystal bee settled on her collar.  She rubbed her temples struggling to drive away the headache and the fear.  She could be opening herself up to random data cascades by going this deep into the ancient and degraded code.  A second bee joined the first and the two hummed as a third bee settled and Dag found a calm place to continue.  She was safe in her own office cubicle, writing down the words from Petra Lainz, the first Empress.  She was surrounded by zardukar and she could feel the hum of the Great Hive all around her, the functioning machinery that kept the Empire running smooth.

If her programs fragmented and failed again, she wasn’t alone.  She picked up her pen as a bee touched the back of her neck with its antenna.  This would be sorted out and once she had a clean and de-bugged page it would go into her sector’s box to everyone in that part of the city.  From Datrus’s reaction he intended to place the history in every box in the Lainz.

#### Perrin Thurmontaler, the second of that name. ####w considers himself ### #### sole owner ### #EO of the planet Chishiki ### Gregori and I and the nine hundred seventy-seven other survivors of the shareholder’s war, are intended to die.  He didn’t even bother trying to kill us directly ###degraded image### just look at the remnants of our homes.   

We are on a continent that is obviously going to be regularly bombarded by ice mined from the moon.  Our homes have been bombed, our fragile, barely begun terraformed valleys blasted back down to basics, our transportation has been recalled to the central port and shut down; locked down under the CEO’s lock.  We have been declared ‘removed’ from the planetary charter.

If I had tears -- it's too páchnuce, boh-prekliaty to cry -- I’d weep because our valleys were almost livable without filters.  Almost wet enough.  Almost lush!  We had green biomass as deep as my arm before you hit Chishiki’s acid sand.  Damn him.  He killed my biomass.  He killed lab techs innocent of the argument over company and planetary ownership he had with Greg ### file corrupted, ####

No doubt if anyone cares to look at a single obscure planet, around a star in a sparse sector of the galaxy, privately bought and owned, we will have suffered grievous accidents since the landing, leaving the sole ownership to Perry, whose idea this all was in the first place.

I hate this primitive recording medium.  It is ephemeral and unlikely to survive well.  Hell.  We are unlikely to survive.

Gregori’s animals... we have the DNA of dozens of animals designed to terraform this gorgeous, awful, beautiful and deadly planet; along with his partly tamed zoo... The birds will be our salvation, our transportation.  They are the only way we’ll make it across the sand to continent D.

Damn Perry to hell.  He’s just destroyed every filtered home, every laboratory, every place we could rest.  Our respirators... half of us don’t have the respirators and are wrapping our faces to keep the toxic particles out of our lungs.

We aren’t going to die, Perry you asshole, you pakalu on a donkey, you son of an ogras, you slimey, diseased amcux. Who am I fooling?  No one is going to access this but me, I can swear like a Nuevo Rus.

C is gone.  It will be full of lakes when the bombardment is finished.  I cannot panic, I will hang onto my rage and it will carry me through. Now is not the time to tell Greg that I’m pregnant. We are going to make it to the other continent.  The baby might not, but I will, Greg will.  All of us, I swear on my babicka’s grave.  The valleys there will be terraformed enough and unpeopled.  Perry will have probably killed Nancia and all her family, even little Karim, over on continent B.

We’ll be able to stay alive on D when we make it, I’m sure of that.  We just have to make it.

We have no communications equipment that is capable of reaching the greater galactic society, or courts.  One day I am going to go to the Terran courts and call the son of a bitch up for murder, fraud, extortion and theft.  But that is after we get out of here.

My slides ### ## lllllllllll###oratory... my field pack at least... I’ve got.  I can keep #### making new creatures to continue making this world into a home we can live on without filters or masks.

Gregori has #### #### managed ##### ## a whole flock of his horrible birds into order.  It will likely burn out his control viruses but it will be worth it.  I should create a ##### ## ##### them more controllable... ### we’re dead if we don’t leave ### into the sea of god-forsaken sand, worse ###### #### ### of my ancestors ever faced.  We will make our own silk road, that only we know.  Pfft.  ### silliness.  Art ##### ## #### ###.  I am no# # #### ### poet.  I’m a ter##former.#### Damn his black, murderous heart. ## ###### ###### #####