Bleaker

fiction, though not in Tucker’s mind.
Now, as he stared at the recent colonist rejection notice, Tucker thought back to a conversation he’d had with his grandfather one night while watching the ARC’s construction. It was nearly three years after the Omni had left Earth.
“Do you think I’ll get on that ARC, Pap?” Tucker asked.
“Well,” his grandfather exhaled. “You see that ARC there won’t go up for at least another fifty years. That’s a long time. Now mind you, I think you’ll be plenty healthy but fifty-nine isn’t young. I reckon they’re gonna want younger people on that ARC. Not saying you won’t get picked. You just never know.”
“I want to go up there,” Tucker said looking up to the sky. “I want to be like the crew of Omni-4.”
“You know they never came back.”
“There’s still time,” Tucker said.
“That’s a good answer.” His grandfather patted Tucker’s knee. “That’s optimism.”
“Then I’m gonna be positive I will go up there.”
“You’re a pretty smart fella,” his grandfather said. “Maybe if you come up with something really big and really important, something they need, then maybe they’ll have no choice but to ask you along.”
“Yeah, I can do that. I’m smart,” Tucker said. “I’ll invent something. But I’m staying right here to do it.”
His grandfather laughed a little. “Not much inventing for science can be done here in North Dakota. Got to go to a good college, too.”
Tucker shook his head. “This is one of the safest places on Earth. I need to stay here so I can make sure nothing happens to my invention.”
His grandfather furrowed his brow. “Why do you say that?”
“Because of that, Pap.” Tucker pointed to the ARC. “That is to save humanity. To stop man from going extinct. To move them elsewhere.”
“Correct.”
“Well, would they build the hope for mankind in a place it could be destroyed?”
His grandfather looked at him. “Forget what I said about you being pretty smart. You’re more than that. You really are. I believe you will come up with that invention.”
“Now if I could just figure out what it would be.”
“Want my suggestion?” his grandfather asked.
Tucker nodded.
His grandfather pointed to the ARC. “Figure out a way to get that thing off the ground. You do that…you’ll have a seat.”
Tucker’s grandfather wasn’t doing that family thing, pumping sunshine into Tucker, overly stating how smart he was. His grandfather didn’t need to because Tucker was smart. In fact, he was a genius. Always ahead in school, graduating at fifteen.
But as astute as he was, Tucker was grounded. He didn’t act like a scholar; he was a home-grown farm boy. He acted it and talked like it.
In his mind, his entire life boiled down to getting the ARC off the ground. He knew from news stories and articles that was holding it up.
It was his mission.
One he didn’t want to fail, but he did.
As smart as Tucker was, as technologically and scientifically inclined as he seemed to be, he wasn’t able to figure out the propulsion problem of the ARC. He tried, but it was above him and he wasn’t able to grasp what would make it work. So he focused on what he knew: growing and farming.
He was, however, able to figure out a way to have a sustainable farming system that would not take up too much room or weight on the ARC. It was to be utilized immediately in case for some reason the ARCS weren’t able to land.
He was praised, even awarded, because he was only twenty-two when he patented his invention. From there he joined the air force search and rescue, but worked mainly in agriculture, salvaging areas hit by disasters.
From inventing for space to inventing on the ground, his next breakthrough was the biggest yet: the floating farm system. The Sharm.
The Department of Navy proudly announced as much on Tucker’s twenty-seventh birthday.
The prototype set sail three years later.
He only wished his grandfather had been alive to see it.
Sadly he had passed one year before the announcement. At least Tucker was able to share his idea with the man who had influenced his life the most. He’d received his expert feedback as he designed it.
With rising oceans, seaboard cities disappeared, and farming land was hit hard by earthquakes, floods, and other ravaging natural disasters.
The world was starving.
Food was scarce and rationed.
The way things were going, most of the human race stood a chance of starving before the ARCs even lifted from the ground.
His invention was a floating farm the size of a five-hundred-foot aircraft carrier. In fact, they reconditioned an old carrier for the prototype. Staffed with a skeleton farming, harvest, and ship crew, the farming system was a hydroponic growth system which utilized a desalination system aboard each floating farm.
The Chinese had been creating an ARC that not only would lift off the ground and make it through space, but would float once it landed on the new planet. The US Navy immediately started to reconfigure their designs.
It was brilliant, he was told.
Not only did he solve a huge food shortage problem on Earth, he may have potentially solved one on the new planet, which was close to seventy percent water.
So with all that accomplishment at such a young age, why did he get rejected as a colonist?
Tucker had done everything he was supposed to do.
Everything to get on the Genesis and be part of their colonist mission.
Each step was preplanned. He applied and was accepted to the Space Corps, he did his training there. Then he went through their rigorous process of applying to be a colonist or crew member.
Tucker believed he had every qualification. He was trained, and having lost his grandfather, and then his sister to the Seattle Quake, he had no family attachments on Earth. Plus, he’d invented the Sharm. He made it to the final selection process and was confident he would be one of the two dozen crew or one of the hundred colonists. Maybe he had been too confident, because he felt blindsided when he got