Communiviewer

PLANET stands at >18,000 words this morning.

My newest invention (#15 to be exact) is the communiviewer. In place of the old-fashioned cell phone, it allows people to see a 3-D image of the sender on their peripheral vision. No Skype feed necessary!

Of course, because only the people connected by the device can see and talk to each other, it will look rather odd to others to see you speaking and gesturing as if to yourself!

Thinking that when they get to New Earth it is already inhabited by a rudimentary society.

Joshua was racking his brain for information he was certain was stored in his memory bank about the journey to the exoplanet that was be their new home. Just over twenty light years away, they would be there in twenty point five years traveling at the speed of light. New Earth, first discovered in the twenty-first century, had twice the gravity of Earth and with its similar temperatures and large reserves of water was ideal. He thought it was a leap of faith to expect this planet in the “Goldilocks Zone” to be free of extraterrestrial life, but he had been assured by scientists that it had been vacant before the probes had “seeded”. Though how they could be so certain, was a little above his pay-grade. 

Something else niggled at him, something one of the scientists had been saying about hoping that if the planet was inhabited, than the seeding process would be necessarily be reductionist in the result. Did this mean that there could be prior inhabitants on New Earth?