Expedition to PL21-13 - Elysium in Progress
6Expedition to PL21-13 is an original album about unpaid interns searching a swampy alien planet for a robot sent by their ancestors hundreds of years ago. It’s also the second in a series about fruit in space. Check it out on Bandcamp!
https://lemonectric.bandcamp.com/albu...
Clementine's Log 09
We found the probe. Looks like it’s the source of the citric pollution. Valencia was able to download its internal logs despite the archaic interface, and I think we figured out what Project Seed was all about. VES-0463 was marooned when its communication and navigation systems were fried by the planet’s magnetic field. After testing for biochemical compounds and comparing the results against the strict parameters programmed into it back home, Vessy (erroneously) came to the conclusion that the planet was devoid of life and switched over to terraforming mode. It’s been slowly acidifying the atmosphere ever since.
It would have taken thousands of years to make the planet habitable, and there would have been no way to contact planet Grapefruit in the meantime, but I don’t think rescue was the point. The robot contains a cache of genetic information. We think Project Seed must have been a contingency plan in case there was no hope for Grapefruitians. PL21-13 would have become a sort of...artificially-germinated afterlife for the species as a whole. Or at least for the offspring of people who were privileged enough to have their genes included in the project. Kind of creepy to think about.