Having said what I needed to say, I’ll return to my journey on Xibalba.

Each of the alien planet’s days was divided into three shifts consisting of labor for the collective, personal time, and more labor, for it was essential to our existence that our first crop yield a bountiful harvest.

During these first six months, I was assigned to a habitat shared by seventy-eight single men and women.

It was there that I met Jude.

Judith Fields was a fellow genetics expert whose specialty was in agriculture. Using the surviving portions of our gene bank, she and her colleagues had begun the process of cloning livestock for New Eden’s farms.

Jude was a country girl, originally from Idaho, with long brown hair, hazel eyes, and a great sense of humor. It was Jude who made me feel again, and over the months, our puppy love blossomed into a strong bond. I found myself, or was it Bill, thinking about her constantly. Whoever it was, our time together was one of great happiness that, at least for the moment, sweetened both our souls.

Jude introduced me to Tan Rashid, an astronomer, originally from England, who entertained us with his ‘theories’ regarding the location of our new home world. You see, despite his computers and star charts, despite his infinite knowledge of the heavens, Tan simply could not discern the location of our planet. Was the distant red supergiant Betelgeuse? If so, none of the other constellations were familiar. Seeking answers, he and his fellow astronomers set to work on building Xibalba ’s first telescope.

As for me, my alter ego—Bill Raby—was a marine geneticist. Since there was little we could do to contribute on an alien planet devoid of oceans, we were assigned to the geology department.

Drone scouts gave us the ability to map New Eden’s entire domed landscape, which spanned nearly 3 million square miles, making it roughly the equivalent of Australia. Engineers determined our floating continent had been built in sections over eons. With its temperate climate control systems and agricultural pods, which we still could not access, they estimated New Eden could house and feed more than 2 billion human beings.

Located twenty feet below the habitat’s rich layer of soil was an inaccessible subterranean chamber, its alien carbon fiber plating composed of the same composite materials used in the dwellings. Within this sealed level, we theorized, had to be the environmental systems that perpetually purified the cloud city’s air and water, fertilized the plant life, and controlled the dome’s shielding mechanism.

The first crop was a bountiful success, and the future of our colony and our species seemed secure.

Two weeks later, the plague struck.