You shelter among the ruins for perhaps a week—curious that you still think in terms of weeks—and then the monotony of the setting drives you onward. You pack up your meager equipment, and continue to wander the surface of this strange setting, Hell.
Next
Another year passes. You become perilously thin, and you tire easily. Long-term malnourishment is having a severe impact on your overall health, you feel. The incessant dampness around your feet has caused your skin to break, and bleed, innumberable times. Each time, you've had to halt your wanderings for fear of the injury becoming infected. That problem, at least, has mostly resolved itself: the skin on the soles of your feet has become calloused, tough.
You've moved far away from the Surgeons now. In your first few months on this world you would chance upon pockets of them, several hundred or several thousand at a time, and you would steer clear of them. Now, you guess it has been several months since you last saw one of these beings. And as you've travelled far from the area that you first appeared on this planet, the terrain around you has begun to change. The ground is harder, now. A spiny grass has begun to sprout from the ground and, though it stabs at your unprotected ankles, you learn it contains a sweet-tasting liquid—a sugary supplement to your diet of moss and fungi.
You also start finding the alien ruins more frequently. You're tempted to make a permanent home of some of the more stable structures. Yet these new discoveries drive you to explore farther still.
And then, in your third year on this world, or perhaps your fourth, you hear something you haven't heard in a long, long time.
You hear a faint hum.
Next