The Vostok Revelation

CHAPTER THREE

An armada of rockets sliced through the planet’s nebulous atmosphere, marring a virgin sky with thousands of billowing gray-white contrails. The fleet divided into clusters of fifty and one hundred rockets which, guided by coordinates entered into their navigation systems eons ago, accelerated before piercing through the planets shallow aqueous covering and embedding themselves deeply into its seafloor. As a yellow sun set on Day One, a loose forest of charred, steaming, down-turned obelisks claimed ownership to a thousand square kilometer parcel of the vacant aqueous world.

It began to rain.

Many years passed before sufficient liquid was absorbed to soften the solid core of each rocket. Engorged with fluid, the obelisks expanded, ancient seams hydrated to create channels throughout the spongy mass. Gradually, long dormant mechanisms, powered by a chemical reaction provoked by the saturation of its surrounding material, began to move within the crevices and cavities of each obelisk, repairing damage caused by space travel and planetary insertion.

Extracting minerals and elements for decades, the one-time rockets developed a hardened black outer crust. Gradually, as they expanded, these shells began to fracture and chunks of the organic debris fell into the sea around the base of each rocket. Exposed to the elements, the raw surface area of the obelisks reacted by excreting a thin oily coating. Within a century, the many layers of excretion formed into a protective malleable coating.

Centuries of precision erosion wore away the supports that fastened the long-dormant engine compartments and depleted fuel tanks to the rockets. Gradually, over the span of several decades, these large structures broke off and fell into the sea, adding to the pile of debris that had already formed at the base of each of the interplanetary vehicles. Far below the waterline, extending down from the spiked nose of each rocket, tendrils snaked deep into the seabed to seek out and feed on minerals.

Exposed to an atmosphere for the first time, re-hydrated tubular ducts passively permitted atmospheric gasses to meander deep into the core the towers. Throughout the labyrinth of ductwork reactions began to occur. Long dormant ancient organic mechanisms, responding appropriately to introduction of the new elements, slowly began to go about the tasks for which they were designed. For two hundred thousand years, scores of maintenance drones worked diligently to prepare each of the ancient rockets for its next evolutionary stage.

Millions of years of excreted waste gradually forced the great ocean away from each tower until a thousand-square-kilometer continent had formed. Phosphorescent green flora, seeded from the biodegraded remains of the rocket fuel storage compartments, populated the long, wide tracts of land between the structures. Two parallel rows of gigantic poppy stalks, their bulbous heads tipped downward, cast white light across a wide black pebbled path to create a grid of light that connected all of the towers.

In their adolescent phase, the inside of each tower had been hollowed into columns and rows of variably sized chambers. These spaces were connected by arched channels and segmented by membrane valves. Externally, every centimeter of each towers skin had formed into perfectly aligned, translucent square indentations that allowed daylight, and warmth, into the chambers.

It was several hours before sunrise when the patch of gray rafflesia covering the rooftop of one of the high-rises absorbed the signal it had waited more than twenty million years to receive. Dutifully, the organic computer ingested the entire transmission, parsed it into its individual packages, and then broadcast each of the twenty-five million schematics to the appropriate tower to begin manufacture.

In a matter of hours, the first batch of prokaryotic bacteria was introduced into the once lifeless world. In less than a day, other, more complex organisms began to be constructed. Every building on the planet was at last doing exactly what they were engineered to do.