Year X

He'd never known real sleep. His body was designed to be alert, his father had explained when he'd asked once. Individual systems would take it in turns to rest and the brain would only rest the parts that needed recuperation. But even then he did not need as much rest as the other men on the station. He'd learned to control it, though. Forced himself to sleep for 6 hours in every twenty-four, and eventually learned to dream....

He was dreaming now he realised and immediately awoke feeling heavy, his body pressing against one side of the coccoon. He was no longer floating. Outside though, was still a vacuum, nothing but silence permeating the walls. No wind, no tremors, no blue planet. But if not the blue planet then where? A thought, and the walls of his self-made prison became translucent....

He dreamed of flowers and trees and fields...of a place he had never known yet knew intimately. The conflict here gave him cause for contemplation. He knew the place and the dreams awoke a desire - albeit deep-seated - to be there. The encounter with the lone walker reinforced this. The solution revealed itself to him in this way...

The sky lay revealed to him, the star-field crystal clear as if he still floated among them. But he was earthbound now, locked to some mass or another. The surface was dark, silhouetted at the horizon only by the starlight. His visual cortex adjusted the the infrared range and he saw where he was, and what floated above him....and he wept.

He belonged in that place because he had been there...it was his home as much as it was any of these men. He knew without knowing. He could feel the tug deep within his abdomen, but could never place it. But it was the truth and like all answers it gave rise only to more questions...

He had drifted around the sun in an ever-decreasing orbit from Jupiter. For how long? Centuries? Millennia? And had come to rest at the final hurdle. His coccoon was buried in the lunar rubble, a new crater on the surface of the bombarded satellite of Earth. And Earth...no longer blue, hung in the sky above the horizon glowing red with fire...

He never asked those questions, but allowed them to fester. If this was true then his father was not his father, his uncles also no relation. There was danger attached to this knowledge or it would have been common long before now. So he theorised, using his evenings of dreamtime to solve the puzzle, to come up with an answer that fitted the problem and one evening by complete accident....he did....

The planet was bloated and old, veined with heat. Like some vast alcohol infected eyeball it seemed to stare back at him, bloodshot and blackened. It's oceans were gone, no blue; not even in the infrared. It was a world boiling itself away into space...

The mind remembered. It was made to remember; made to learn. The accumulation of knowledge was as important to him as it was to them. That's why they had been so far from home. They were driven to learn - to explore. And as in his life, each new thing learned raised another question. They learned not only of what is, but of what had been and what was yet to come....

The moon was just as it had been in pictures.Only in the infrared it showed up violet-blue, cool and dead. But even in this part of the spectrum details shone through. Irregularities surrounded him: craters, mountains, puddles of dust peppered with rocks. Almost directly in from of him was something else, though. Something alien. Amongst the chaos was a tiny patch of order. Something on the lunar landscape had a geometry more symmetrical than it's surroundings and as he stared at it, he noted that parts of it glowed faintly white....

They searched in space for answers, and within themselves and realised the path to omniscience lay not in the present nor the future, but in the past. To know there origins was to know all. They were tied to generations past for there was their basis for learning. People became what their parents made them, and they in turn were what their parents made them. They were the sum of all that had went before. He recalled Darwin and his father's classroom. Pictures of DNA from animals, plants and humans...and the picture shown to him on a whim by his father of his own...

The coccon liquified and cloaked itself around him, allowing him freedom to move - and move he did. Once more he found himself running across a lunar landscape, his true birth star - now dead and rotting - floating above his head and the closer he came the more defined the object became....

In his dreamstate there were no distractions. He could see the past in perfect detail. Animal DNA, Human DNA, Plant DNA. Which animal and which plant, he had no way of knowing. But which human was a question easily answered....

It was a vehicle. He switched from infrared to save damage as the sun burst out from behind the dead Earth and he saw it clearly - gleaming in the new light, as though the final rivet had been fixed seconds before, it bore a marking he was unfamilar with. A square shape coloured with crosses of red and white against a background of blue, and below it - written in bold English - the name of the vessel....

He was no different from them after all. As human as the man who called himself father, as human as his uncles, as human as his...mother...who surely must have lived. His birth star...not a star at all he knew now hung in the sky above his sleeping body and he felt it's tug even through the facilities thick iron walls....home....

He entered the vehicle and sealed the door shut behind him. The controls were simplistic. An automatic launch button, a keypad for automatic course programming and a flight stick for manual maneouvring. He launched as soon as he was strapped in. The course was easy enough to decide....

The brain knew the dangers the quest for knowledge held. It was a product of it. To know the laws that governed a thing was to control the thing. These people had unlocked the laws bound in their DNA and, now masters of themselves they sought the answers to the universe. And they looked for them in it's past, as they had looked in their own...

The facility lurched and he awoke to panic....

He sought out his father and waited....

The vehicle was all that was left to testify to the existence of human life. There were no origins left to discover here. Not his own, at least. His answers lay smouldering a half-million miles behind him and further away by the second.

The course he set took him away from here. To the stars. Behind him there was nothing, in front of him was the universe - infinite and ever-present. The past no longer had a meaning. It was time for a new paradigm.

The last human slid silently into the dark in search of the future, the last touch of the Earth's yellow sun glinted off the name-plaque on it's side.

"Invincible"

And then all was black again.