Planet Ignis | Chapter 23

When they told me they all wanted to go planetside and follow Hitori’s plan, I knew they had all lost their minds. I can’t die. I just can’t. Did they expect me to take it with a smile as they told me that I must settle with living a couple of decades at most? In that desert?! I have seen the AI reports. There is nothing down there! Nothing! There is no way they will make me turn into a cursed mutant. No! The solution is in the drones. You need to find them all and fuse all seven cores!

Files salvaged from the Raptor’s Ghost Drive. Recorded by Schneider, the Raptor

Hitori had always enjoyed Mount Fuji the most in autumn. When he studied in Tokyo, he often came up here to hike on the weekends. Unfortunately, perhaps as a side effect of being encased in ice for so long, he couldn’t shake the idea of winter from his subconscious. Instead of fiery leaves, he had to settle for freezing winds and snow as he hiked up the mountain for today’s memory walk.

Today, he was reminiscing about his scientific discoveries. He imagined that the sculptors of Mount Rushmore would have been proud if they could see what he had done here. He stopped next to the first sculpture chiseled into the rock: himself, hunched over a microscope.

The monument immortalized the moment he first studied celeria. Hitori had marveled at the alien bacteria, which used polarized ignium instead of water in their cells. If he could gift this adaptation to humans, he would have found the path to survival. That realization had marked the beginning of his miracle work.

As he climbed higher, mounds of snow grew deeper, and he arrived at the next carving: himself with a delicate hummingbird perched on his finger. Hitori had always turned to nature’s designs for answers. Unlike many of his colleagues, he believed in God, finding no contradiction between faith and science. Whenever an insurmountable obstacle arose, he sought inspiration from the best scientist he knew.

The hummingbird had provided a critical clue. Its accelerated metabolism—its heart beating almost 80 times faster than a human’s—offered a glimpse into how humans might digest and metabolize ignium. It would require enormous energy and place significant wear on the body, but perhaps therein lay the secret to humanity’s survival.

Further up, the next carving depicted Hitori studying an eel. Polarized ignium had unique properties, and Hitori’s thoughts had turned to organisms like electric eels and geobacters that could produce strong electrical currents. The Phoenix’s comprehensive library had survived the Flare, and within its archives, Hitori found the DNA sequences of Earth’s life. Could he engineer a system to generate the energy needed to keep ignium polarized? This question guided him through months of experimentation.

The next sculpture portrayed him holding a vial up to the light—a testament to his Eureka moment. Inspired by celeria, hummingbirds, and electric eels, Hitori had produced the Celer mutagen.

He had been so thrilled by his success that he’d shared the news with his crew immediately. True, the mutation came at a cost. The accelerated metabolism it induced would cause rapid wear on their bodies, shortening their lifespans. But better to live a few more decades on Ignis than starve aboard the Phoenix. They had even begun drafting settlement plans, including blueprints for the Womb and Hearth.

Unfortunately, the work was interrupted. Schneider made his move.

Hitori’s path took him to a barren part of the mountain, where all the trees were dead, and the ground cracked and spent. Pools of bubbly tar reflected his despair. On black obsidian rock lay a sculpture of Schneider, half-human, half-machine, his face twisted into an evil grin.

Hitori remembered the moment he uncovered Schneider’s aberrant plans. Before the crew could stop him, Schneider ejected the Raptor module. Panic had swept through them. With no military defenses left, they were sitting ducks.

Hitori administered the Celer mutagen to the crew, urging them to flee and complete their plans on the planet’s surface. He stayed behind to buy them time, knowing he was the only programmer skilled enough to counter Schneider. While the settlers descended to Ignis, Hitori locked Schneider out of the Stellaris Grid, ramming a satellite into the ship to disrupt his upload.

But Hitori’s relief was short-lived. Schneider had died, but the Raptor survived. Even worse, the drone had begun its attempts to hack into the satellite grid. Though Hitori’s efforts had slowed it, he couldn’t stop it completely. Schneider’s creation was relentless.

Eventually, Hitori’s provisions ran out. Returning to the settlers wasn’t an option—it would lead the Raptor right to them. He had to survive alone.

The next sculpture on the mountain showed him feeding an acorn to a squirrel, with an iguana perched on his shoulder. In his darkest hour, Hitori had found another path. Iguanas used their surroundings to regulate their body temperature. Arctic squirrels hibernated for months at subzero temperatures while preserving their brain chemistry.

Creation again offered answers. With these inspirations, Hitori developed the Tardus mutagen. Unlike Celer, it slowed metabolism to a crawl while preserving brain function. It was a second miracle.

Hitori smiled at the irony. Here he was, reminiscing about his life on a snowy mountain, while his real body lay encased in ice. When he’d descended to the coldest part of Ignis, he’d used the Phoenix’s remnants to build a freezer. Starving and exhausted, he administered the mutagen, activated the freezer, and hoped it would work.

It did. For 463 years.

Six years had passed since the seventh thaw. As he approached the summit, Hitori paused before an unmarked stretch of rock. The cliff wall ahead seemed like a promising place for a new carving. Where would the monument to Statera go?

Suddenly, a flash of green caught his eye. He crouched, brushing aside the snow to reveal a blade of grass. A pang of disbelief shot through him. He had never seen natural green in centuries on Ignis.

He stood, scanning his surroundings. Sweat dampened his brow as the air grew warmer. The snow beneath him softened, becoming wet and slushy. The realization hit him like a Burst of energy.

The snow was melting.

Closing his eyes, Hitori let himself slip into his mental world. He appeared in his Tokyo garden. Bright green leaves sprouted on the previously bare trees, and buds swelled with promise. He teleported through memories of the city, each one alive with Spring’s arrival.

Standing in the middle of a sunlit Shibuya crossing, Hitori laughed, a joyous sound echoing across his mental Tokyo. It worked. The experiment had worked. The settlers had received his message.

They had made it before the Raptor.

Opening his eyes, Hitori felt the cold of Ignis around him, but it no longer seemed oppressive. It was time to prepare for the end of Winter—and the battle ahead.

Chapter 24