Today's #flashfiction #CosmicReboots

“It was love at first sight.”

The Invisible Man* #quote

Today I found some magic beans! I traded them for a cow. Anyway onto the flash fiction!

Cosmic Reboots

        The cosmos gives evolution a natural reboot on all planets with life. Unlikely to happen during any particular day, but nearly inevitable, space will deliver to a planet large enough rocks to wreak havoc on life and reboot the system. Rock after rock, planet after planet, the system reboots.

      Earth is one of those planets that has gone through reboots from the stars and will keep getting reboots. But something happened on Earth during the next fall of a major rock that didn't normally happen on other life planets. A species defied the normal principles of the reboot.

      Now, with every reboot some species often survive, even if just some bacteria, so by surviving humanity did not break any rule. But to understand how they defied the rule it must be said that this rock fell many years in the future from 2014. They saw it coming. Stored all matter of D.N.A. from various species beyond their own in facilities, alongside vast stores of food. When the meteor struck the environment was devastated but many of them managed to survive. And other species that shouldn't have did.

     Humanity could also genetically engineer things with more ease than before. They made things to adapt to the change. The reboot became more of a genetic design fight. Though humans never changed themselves on the outside out of some religious and cultural beliefs they modified their organs and other parts as well to adapt. And as the worst parts of the reboot's damage subsided the humans designed the whole new world as they pleased. The rock served as a catalyst for human reconstruction of Earth.

      And the humans kept records of this event. And many, many years later it happened again. And they were even more prepared. And the new humanity of this time constructed a world after that. The technologies of that era making it even more different than what humanity made from the first reboot.

Reboot after reboot humanity created the world over and over, and preserved itself with genetic engineering, enhancing itself, but keeping some echoes of its own form and keeping its own lineage in tact. It didn't branch like other species. It designed itself to be a royal lineage in evolution.

      But the cosmos did not reboot only with rocks. Eventually it aimed to wipe away whole worlds to start anew. The Sun already began changing. Humanity knew that Earth would eventually be consumed by a growing Sun, or it would explode, or turn into a black hole. So they departed for other worlds.

      And the cycle continued. Humanity fighting reboots on every world they went to. Ones that could support them already, or ones they terraformed into habitable planets. Perhaps the death of the universe would stop humanity. Or would they find a way to stop that?