“Madness… pure madness…” The grey-haired scientist
waved his palms across the holographic wall in
frustration. Each swipe of his wrinkled, clawed Nephilim
hands pushed a complex equation to the side of the wall
or off the edge and into the digital bin.

With a large empty space now occupying the centre
of the holographic wall, the hulking Nephilim scientist
scrawled a clean and deceptively simple equation.

V = Sqrt(GM/R)

“… or magic.”

“Gratar, this is not what we are here to do.” The
frustrated Corporate botanist took a seat; she knew this
would take a while. “We need to continue our genetic
mapping of the flora and fauna across the system.”

“Child’s play.”

“Child’s play? Really?” Sam hated how her counterpart
could so easily reduce her life’s work to nothing. “We
haven’t even begun to scratch the surface on the genetic
structures of even half the Archon-created plants on
Mishpacha, let alone the mutated X’ion hybrids…”

“No!” Gratar gritted his teeth in frustration. “It means
nothing to understand how the Archons and the X’ion
populated the worlds if we can’t grasp the basics of how
the worlds were altered to accommodate life.”

“But we do know. humanity used powerful chemical
synthesisers to alter and balance the atmo…”

“You are missing the point! Atmospheres, bio-diversity,
all of this we can begin to grasp. But this!” Gratar pointed
towards his wall. “Gravity, this eludes us all.”

Sam sat patiently. This would take a while.

“We often mistakenly think that electronics was
humanity’s crowning achievement. But it’s not…” Gratar
closed his large eyes in thought. “It’s as if humanity
looked at the planets like we would look at an overgrown
field and said, ‘No, this will not do; let me change things
so that I may build a home here’… to planets! They had
this attitude of damn planets! None of our orbits or
gravitation pulls are what they should be! None of them!
Humanity has changed every single one of them, and
we have no idea how!