HORTON

By Jess Donoho

After a mass exodus from our dying world, the inhabitants of The Glorious Daylight drift endlessly through space for millennia. Against all odds, they crash land into a habitable planet. Horton is in a coma, but entirely conscious. From the moment of the crash landing, he is the central player in a complex and humorous series of events that jus

• Language: English
• Publisher: JessDonoho.com
• Release date: Apr 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9798869251718

Jess Donoho

The debut fiction novella from Jess Donoho. Following the lessons from Seuss' "Horton Hears A Who", this is a modern retelling with twists and turns. It follows the exodus of the planet and centuries of drifting in space before discovering a single habitable occurrence to crash land on. What follows changes entire civilizations for eternity. This is a short, cheerful story for bedtime, beach time or anytime reading.

Book preview

PREFACE

This is not a tale of outer space fantasy or of going where no man has gone before. It is not a rally cry to climate change, or ignorant disregard of what science tells us day after day. It is simply the end result of man’s folly, culminating in a tiny spark of hope for humanity.

It is the classic retelling of civilizations that were run by greedy little men building empires within borders and boundaries. They used deceit, lies, and manipulation to gain wealth and power. They pander to corporations who are willing to destroy our entire ecosystem in the pursuit of financial excess for a few, and sustained mediocrity for the masses. And of the masses who have little, but follow in fear of losing what little they do have.

Eventually, you reach the bottom of the barrel. You exhaust everything until there is a point of no return. The only option is to leave what you have created.. then destroyed (and will likely do the same to some other planet elsewhere in the universe). We are a civilization who does not learn from our mistakes. We are destined to both greatness and moronic ineptitude.

Yes, this story starts as a science fiction, but stay focused reader, for it takes a sudden, wrenching twist and everything you thought you knew, becomes something entirely different. – Author.

THE GLORIOUS DAYLIGHT

When science determined that within 200 years, the planet would no longer support life, the politicians and corporations quickly dismissed it as fake news. It would take 100 precious years for reality to hit that there was no hope for this dying planet, and for panic to set in. First, every country on the planet set aside centuries of racism, war, hatred, violence, religion, and politics and came together in a single unifying task of preserving the species. Money that had previously been spent on war, drugs, corporate greed, luxury cars and televangelists, was pooled into scientific research that would advance our knowledge of space travel, agriculture, technology, and industry. Miraculously, within a decade of the planets demise, eighteen thousand ships had been constructed to transport the entire living population of this dying planet into the furthest reaches of space. As each living plant and creature was loaded, special care was made to keep mosquitos, ticks, cockroaches venomous snakes, religious fanatics, lawyers, and politicians off the ships. Finding a habitable planet anywhere in the universe might take decades. There was no reason to make this journey intolerable. Each of these ships were cast to the Universe in its own desperate search for a habitable planet to occupy.

As the Captain of the Glorious Daylight, Jonas Lightweather was determined that he would be the first to find a new world, therefore ensuring his name would live on forever. Jonas Lightweather was raised from infancy to this position. He had been trained since birth to command a great ship. He had been told of his greatness all his life and he believed every word. Jonas Lightweather was a man of great knowledge and a greater ego. His crew was handpicked over the seventy years of his life and now, on the dawn of the end of the world, Jonas Lightweather would be the savior he knew himself to be.

Eighteen-thousand ships were provisioned and loaded. Final goodbyes were made. Final tears shed and on the appointed day, they lifted off as one, each in a different direction in search of a new world. A new home.

Jonas Lightweather was indeed a great captain. He carried his authority like a benevolent caregiver and kept order among the thousands of occupants of his ship. Man, and beast alike lived in relative harmony. The ship was shiny and new, and serviced the needs of all occupants in comfort and care. It was a spectacular beginning to what was to be a long, long, long journey. Jonas Lightweather would pass in his sleep at the age of 127 and would achieve his goal of becoming a legend, for a while. The first three or four centuries after his death, there were songs sung of his intelligence and bravery. Into the sixth century following his death, he was still mentioned in a history book or two. In the seventh century, a fire in the records room erased all memory of Jonas Lightweather and within a few generations following, his name was gone forever.

What was intended as a short journey into space to discover a new world became drifting in space for an eternity. As provisions were depleted, the animals were the first to be barbequed and baked into oblivion. Only sheer will saved the vegetation and converted most of the space within the ship to farms. In the wake of Jonas Lightweather, generations of disagreement, argument, and general underhanded politics had rendered the command of the Glorious Daylight from a ship of harmony to monarchy which devolved into a patriarchy then to matriarchy and then there was no place to go but to dictatorship. In the second millennium after the exodus from their planet, the inhabitants of the Glorious Daylight were living in a squalid, fetid dirge of a vessel. The electronics and computers were a patchwork of semi-conscious artificial intelligence, the engines faltered centuries prior, and the ship was now carried by its long-declining velocity in the vacuum of space. The shiny exterior was riddled with dents and dings from tons of space junk slamming against the hull, and the pristine interior had become a tattered and beat up old hag. Her batteries had little to no electrical energy left in them and could only be used for the most basic tasks on the ship. In short, the Glorious Daylight was a derelict ship on a path to nowhere.

The Glorious Daylight was massive. Her 72 decks, once filled with sumptuous living space, were gutted to make room for farms and water recycling. The remaining space was used for cramped quarters. It was hot, wet, steamy, and smelled of decomposing plants. The plants loved this moisture and their prodigious crop kept up with the food demands of the crew. The top level was the swampiest. Steam vents poured moisture into the air, making it miserably hot and wet. The water that fed these plants ran down through the artificial soil where it would be used for the next level down, which was a slightly drier climate hosting a different type of plants. Way, way, way down in the bottom of the ship, many floors below were arid deserts. When the last bit of water seeped down into the soil here, it was heated by the machinery in the belly of the Glorious Daylight, converted to steam, which rose back up through the ship to the top, becoming water for the tropical forest again. Over the course of centuries, the passengers on board the Glorious Daylight had adapted to this moist, wet environment.

Each floor had a crew assigned to manage and care for the farm on that specific level. For instance, Floor 22 was dedicated to what once may have resembled a potato. Its former smooth, oval shape had devolved into a lumpy, squishy vegetable that provided essential nutrient, but not in a way that tasted good. The cooks would mix this root with many other plants to make a mush that was edible. In centuries past, the passengers of the Glorious Daylight would have dined on sumptuous meals and washed it down with fine wine, but today, food was just a utility product designed to perpetuate the species until they found a new home.

Agrumph, the oldest and wisest of all farmers on the Glorious Daylight, managed floor 22 farm. He was often called upon to travel throughout the ship to advise and assist with the farms on other levels. Agrumph’s pride and joy was Prit, his young daughter, in whom he had instilled a sense of wonder and exploration. He often took her on his travels through the ship and she paid rapt attention to the adults talking about science, water, crops, and machinery. They often talked about things the Glorious Daylight used to have. While the other kids formed gangs to raid competitor farms, Prit would sit up late into the night reading entries in the ships logs from centuries before, completely mesmerized by the technology that allowed them to escape one fate, only to be subject to another. Prit read voraciously, listened intently and in the privacy of her secret places, she conducted experiments using the old methods. They rarely worked, for Prit was only a young woman and had not yet learned how to understand the knowledge she was receiving, but she tried nonetheless and sometimes succeeded, to her great surprise and happiness.

The adults onboard the Glorious Daylight thought Prit was a foolish child. Trying to learn anything but farming had been given up long ago. The keepers of the computers and machines were the lowest members of society. The kids Prit’s own age were interested in thieving and mischief. They were either stripping parts from the ship and selling them to farmers on different decks for credits, or they were joining the Young Farmers Association to advance the productivity and taste of the food. They had no interest in machinery, computers, science and the like. They found Prit peculiar and awkward. Prit did not often think of the other kids on the ship, but when she did, it hurt. She had no friends, but she really wanted one. No one understood her and she did not understand them. She was alone on this great big ship full of people.

One afternoon found Prit wandering up to the Bridge of the ship. This is where hundreds of officers used to control, manage, and operate the Glorious Daylight. The door to the Bridge was hanging from a single