The Good Ones

Evolution is a constant happening. Natural selection made it so that only the best of those evolutions stay and pass onto the next generation. All the bad ones get cut off. After a few million years, Only the best traits that occurred through evolution stays and dominates. It's been like this for thousands of years. Even cancer is part of an evolution process. It not might be good, but the cells become something more than it is.

Planetary evolution was a bit different though. As a planet was comprised of many many organisms and everyone played a part in their ecosystems and in deciding the overall path to progression of the planet. As life was inherently chaotic, it couldn't really be predicted how it'd evolve on its own. Even if the situations of the two planets were exactly same, There was no guarantee that the species and ecosystems would be 100% identical after a million years. They probably would be similar, but they'd ultimately differ from each other ever so slightly.

Evolution researchers always wanted to study how 2 similar planets would evolved throughout the years. In practice, it wasn't easy to find 2 identical planets that shared the same traits where such research could be performed. As such an experiment needed to be controlled, All the conditions needed to be same as to provide usable data.

It was practically impossible to find 2 identical planets to perform such experiments. Yet, Before Kita was 4 of them. 4 planets that were identical in their constitution, Orbit, Size and gravity well. Everything matched. These planets perfect for such research. But there was one huge problem.

The planets themselves heated up immensely during their close proximity with their stars. This was a fatal problem as life simply couldn't exist in such extreme environments. Everything will die as the temperature reaches above 150 degrees. Although some species can endure temperatures way above that, but even they couldn't survive on these planets where it reached 2500C on a regular basis. The planets were moving very slow. This helped it cool down enough before it's next heat up cycle. It was remarkable how stable this heat-up and cool down cycles were. Humanity couldn't achieve such a remarkable balance with it's current capabilities.

The race behind this phenomena has truly mastered planetary modifications. This was a huge deal! No matter what, Humans couldn't match up to them. But as it seemed, there wasn't anyone around. There were no Alien races in the whole Star chain. Even the V point seemed void of any activity. Either the party responsible for this went extinct or, didn't want to introduce themselves.

"These planets could be use as really good test grounds, if only their orbits weren't so wired.", Kita sighed.

"You think that the aliens were also using these planets as some kind of research grounds? I mean, it's highly probable.", York said with amusement.

"That's highly possible, but what can they be researching? It's definitely not evolution as there's not enough time for anything to evolve into anything meaningful. They'll just die off."

"That's true. I sure as hell don't want to meet creatures who can survive that kind of temp. Who knows if they can even be killed.", York said with a horrified voice.

Anything that could survive the temperatures on the planet during the heating cycle probably couldn't be killed.

"I wonder what we'll find there, I wonder what kind of an world lies beneath that cloud of gas.", York said.

"Well, There's water, that's for sure. According to the data, all 4 of them are just at the end of their heat cycle and temps should be around 20-25C for all of them. They should be cooling down pretty soon. And It'll only cool down for the foreseeable future. It won't be another 80 years before they begin heating up and reaches this temp.", Kita said as he projected the data and the projected orbit of the planets at their specific temps.

"It's all accurately planned out. But for what? What's the use ?", York said as he studied the projection.

"Maybe we'll get an answer when we are there."

"We better. Otherwise we're wasting our time and a bunch of fuel for nothing."

"It's never a waste to analyze any phenomena. Even if something doesn't come up from it now, Maybe One day it'll be valuable. You never know."

"That's true."

"Well, I'll go get some rest, Staying up for 38 hours is tiring.", Kita said as he began to tidy up his terminal.

"See you later!"

Kita decided to stop here for now. Things could wait till Dr. Kbom got the permissions and the first team was sent off to the planets.

He went out the lab and towards the lift. He was gonna go to his state room where he stayed with his wife Dr. Helen. As both of them were high level researchers and a couple, they were assigned a State room big enough for a family of 4. Although only the 2 of them were staying there. It was home. The state room was situated at the residential parts of the Shore. It was the part where most of the crew stayed. It was partitioned into different section and were assigned to the crew based on their rank and station. The higher the rank, the better the rooms assigned to them. On a ship where every Cubic meter was precious, rooms were planned out really carefully to make sure that there was enough for the whole crew and then some.

When he entered into his state room, he saw Dr. Helen on a terminal studying the latest data coming from the planets. Currently these were her most important curiosity. The fuzzy images from The V point didn't excite her for now as almost nothing could be concluded from those. Compared to that, the Data coming off of the 4 planets were more interesting.

"Hey honey, Welcome back.", She said without looking towards him.

"Hey, How was your day?", Kita said as he hug her from behind. And watched as she was modeling different simulations of the planets.

"It was fine. Really exciting stuff going on.", She said.

"Have you had dinner yet?"

"No, I was waiting for you!", She said as she turned around and looked at him. They both had a very long day. And both of them were Exhausted.