The Keeper

The rule for this contest is that you have 15 minutes to write a story or poem. The prompt was a picture of a hand submerged in a background of zeros and ones. Like the walls in the Matrix.

Zeros and ones floated across a virtual sky as The Keeper slumbered in his hibernation mode. It had been more than two centuries since the program had been first initiated but it would take millennia before the sequences began to repeat themselves.

That all changed when the proximity alarm sounded.

The Keeper’s screensaver flickered before disappearing. In a nano-second, his visual drive flipped over to the external monitors looking for what one of his sub-minds had detected.

Landfall!

It was still more than twenty years away ship-time, but the incoming data stream was filled with all of the right answers. Some conditions were a bit extreme but well within pre-embryonic genetic manipulation boundaries. The dense planet would have a high gravity. There were also indications of solar flares and a thin protective ozone layer.

The Keeper activated the defrost cycle for his bio-casing so he would have a body to move around in. An hour later, he uploaded himself and stepped out of the freeze chamber.

In the lab, he began to assemble the various ingredients he would need. It was a relatively simple matter to nip and tuck at the genetic strands in a way that would equip the test-tubers with the physical traits they would need to survive.

At the same time, his sub-minds were busy creating a nursery and teaching facilities.

By the end of the day, The Keeper closed up the last womb-bubble. He verified that his checklist was completed before heading back to the freeze chamber. He set his alarm for nine months and then downloaded himself into the ship’s mainframe.

Soon he was again floating in the calmness of his digital dreams.