Original Music #11 - Life on Titan II

Based on a science fiction story that was forming in my head while I was recording the song!

Here is the story that was forming in my head as I was writing and recording this song.

Life on Titan.
Ever since Voyager 1 flirted with Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, way back in 1980, scientists, world leaders, and eventually adventurers, determined to make this body a new home. After centuries of probing missions involving everything from flybys, landers, drones, and finally an expeditionary vanguard, here we are 1,069 years later. From what began as an outpost in the centre of the face permanently toward Saturn, we now have a vast civilisation made up of workers, scientists, environmentalists, botanists, and whatever else we need to make life on Titan possible.

I’m one of the workers, not educated enough to be a decision maker in the bunkers and offices safely tucked under the geodomes, but bred, trained and charged with repairing the oxygenators that convert the nitrogen and methane atmosphere into breathable oxygen. Every day I would work a 120-hour shift plugging holes in the shield around the oxygenators created by micro-meteorites. But the view outside the geodomes was worth it. Through the dim orange haze I could sit and watch Saturn, huge in the sky, slowly wheel over the horizon, or catch a distant cryovolcano spewing water, steam and ammonia into the forever twilit sky. They say that the Earth was like this place, with lakes and rivers, clouds and rain, seas and sand dunes, seasons and so on. ‘They’, meaning the eggheads in the geodome bunkers, gave lectures on our distant past. Lectures detailing the history of our ‘home’ planet, and the reasons why we no longer live there. Indeed, why nobody lives there anymore. All pretty depressing really, but the view from my secret vantage point (on a steep incline behind the furthest of the 5 geodomes, but don’t tell anyone) was spectacular.

It was on Iapetusday, the 7th day of the Titanic week, that a warning came through the Mars suit’s comlink. A spray of Taurids, kicked towards us by Jupiter’s gravitational influence, were due to arrive in our neighbourhood within the next day. Considering a day is more than 360 hours long, we assumed there was plenty of time to prepare the micro-meteorite repair kits, however, a second warning came through, this time more urgent than before. These Taurids were much bigger than micro-meteorites. There was going to be some serious damage.

On orders, I and the other repairers headed for the subsurface bunkers to wait out the meteor shower. When it came it sounded like countless bombs going off above our heads. The kind of explosions the landscapers used many years ago when they built the 5th geodome. But then they used 3 explosions to make the plateau, now we gave up counting how many bunker rocking explosions took place over the course of several hours.

After checking life-supplies and Mars suits, we surfaced to assess the damage. Three of the 5 geodomes were completely destroyed, one was hemorrhaging oxygen from a large hole in the side, and the fifth seemed to have survived. Some crackling in the Mars suit’s comlink heralded another message from the eggheads’ bunker. They were ordering us to rendezvous at some long-lat point so far that we had to get the old-style metal charts out, as there was no network signal for the Mars suit’s navi. As we set out in the general direction, we noticed that the sky was becoming darker than the dull norm we had become accustomed to. Must be all the dust and debris kicked up into the thick atmosphere.

Where to go now, the night is closing in.
Where to go now, the air is getting thin.
And there's no-one on the street
Save the suffocating heat that beats your lungs till morning comes.

Where to go now, the wind is getting strong.
Where to go now, been walking all day long.
Now there's people everywhere
Breathing up the precious air into their lungs till night time comes.

Where to go now, the days are dark as night
Where to go now, I've been searching for a light
Now there's not a soul around,
Not a person to be found, where did they go, can someone show us?

Where do we go to?
Where do we go to now?
Follow the signs, follow the leader.
Go where they lead you,
Go where they go, and don't look back.