Hale Volkova’s first address as leader of the Cluster

We dig together, we grow together.

It has been a generation since my father, the esteemed Dr. Veer Volkov, packed up his few belongings from Earth and made way to the asteroid belt around Saturn.

Earth was dying, but not dead yet. And while humanity prepared their spaceships for galactic travel, learned the known rules of the universe and picked which ones to defy, the success of humanity’s expansion into the cosmos was threatened by a simple need: humans must eat.

But there was a glimmer of hope. Asteroids dotting Saturn’s rings, which seemed to host a growth of exo-fungus. Fungus which did not wither under radiation nor break under solar winds. Fungus that grew from mineral-rich soil in the asteroids, made of composition we would soon discover the secret of … once it was too late to turn back. But before the discovery of the soil came the discovery of the fungus. All that was needed were those courageous enough to pack shovels, tea pots, and trowels and head for an irreversible life, establishing agriculture on those dead rocks.

My father, Dr. Volkov, was one of those brave few. He led the intrepid scientists and frontiersmen to new life. His spacesuit was the first to leave the airlock. His shovel broke the first ground. His hand cultivated the first exo-fungus, and his stomach digested it before anybody else. He survived on the alien fungus and then he set about building a world to cultivate it. Knowing there was no future left on Earth, they broke down their spaceships to build homes, they tilled what they could of the soil and mined what grew deep in the ground. Still, harvests were unreliable. The fungal growth was sporadic at best. Abundant at times, scarce at others. It did not follow a harvest/fallow period like on Earth. Because, of course, we were not on Earth.

And eventually, as my father and the others would learn, we weren’t even living on a rock. We lived on the dead and decomposing remains of a long forgotten cosmic leviathan, a beast unknown to human physiology and seeming to have drifted into our solar system as its final burial. We prophesied that the leviathan came from a void, or elsewhere, deceased eons before mankind ever walked. We reckoned that as its corpse drifted into Sol, it got caught in Saturn’s gravity, its soft, decomposing body ripped apart by the force of Saturn’s pull, orbiting the gas giant in its dismembered decay.

When we learned of this truth, we ran calculations. How long until the decay was too far gone to support human life? How long until the ground crumbles and we must evacuate? Centuries longer than my lifetime is the projection, based on the current rate of decomposition. Humanity’s best botanists and agriculturalists all agree. Centuries more. If not millennia. Our generation shall eat. The next generation, my newborn stepdaughter’s generation, will eat. And so shall her children’s generation, and the next, and the next. Our end is not nigh.

And just as soon as humanity spread far enough into the galaxy, fed by our supplies, they forgot about us. In turn, we, too, forgot that the leviathan was once a living thing. We disinfected its name, defanged it in our collective memory so we could continue tilling its bone and eating the fungus that grew from its decay without giving it further thought. Even as it fought back in turn, infecting us with Clusterlung from inhaling its spores, we sanitized it. This is the price to pay for not being hungry. This is the price to pay for being sated. This is the price of your lives among the stars. A price paid by the broken bones of the leviathan and the broken bones of those who built this world for us. This is the cost of survival. Remember that.

That is what we must never forget. We do what we do to survive. To eat. And I will do what I must to ensure that, no matter how much we have been shunned by the rest of humanity, that we will never go hungry. I will never forget about you, my community, my disciples, my family. I will fight for us to live here and thrive here and depend upon no one but ourselves.

We once fed humanity, and that made us great.

Now we need only feed ourselves, and that makes us strong.

Hale Volkova

Year 2210

Thanks for reading the first of our dive into the archives of The Cluster, as we unearth the history of the colony and its people. We'll be sharing more soon as we continue on our journey to Act Two.

✨ See you in the stars,

Colin [Community Manager]