🌠 Noah's Ark

Noah was born in a spaceship far away from Earth. Born is not a proper term, he was cloned using alien technology and found himself in a company of a biorobot who was designed to train contortionists. The two were the sole intelligent creatures aside from the ship's mainframe.

Noah grew up as a smart boy whose body was as flexible as his mind thanks to daily training with Naamah and his natural curiosity. The fellow robot was also capable of recording his vision and Noah often loved to rewatch the moments of his training throughout his life and it gave him strange pleasure to watch how his flexible poses looked from another person's perspective.

Noah was in love with contortion and even as a young child he started creating his own exercises and techniques to get better at it. He always marvelled at the body he had, the unique and beautiful organism, amazing in so many ways, from looking beautiful to be able to bend in so many shapes, when all of a sudden his technical genius allowed him to restore some of the deleted clusters of data in Naamah's memory.

He discovered some of Naamah's earliest recordings, not from this spaceship but from some completely different place that reminded Noah roughly of the ship's greenhouse but incomparably bigger, in fact so big that it made Noah dizzy as his mind was ready to explode from the greatness of the captured sceneries. How big had to be the spaceship that contained a greenhouse where you couldn't even see the end of it!

This green place was literally filled with species exactly like Noah himself, as well as androids of all kinds. In the recordings Naamah trained some of the people who were just as flexible as Noah, but his vision captured other people who looked different, some of them doing things that would never cross Noah's mind, some were wearing something on their waists, making them as small as their necks, while some other people didn't even have arms and legs and used robotic suits to move round.

Noah was in awe of this place... Carefully rewatching Naamah's lost memories frame by frame he was able to reconstruct some aspects of that place's culture and history.

He discovered the place was not a spaceship but a planet that had all sorts of plants growing right on its surface! Its surface wasn't made just from rocks like most planets but was covered in all kinds of strange substances that allowed the plants to grow, which in turn made possible to live right on the planet without air generators as the planet generated its own air.

Noah's young mind couldn't even fully grasp all this, he felt as if he could study this planet to the rest of his life and still not get to the bottom of it. So he decided to leave the environment aside and focus on the people.

He found the society on that planet hadn't always been that great. At some point flexibility and other similar things were perceived as something negative by the majority of that world's population and 99.999% of people were absolutely inflexible, more than half of them couldn't even touch their toes. They had grotesque shapes, massive and obese, they had rough skin, hair growing right out of their faces and other unpleasant features, some people were very hard to look at, it was like a nightmare.

The forefathers of that species looked even more horrifying, they were crooked apes who couldn't even stand straight, let alone do anything flexible. They had fur all over their body. Noah started to understand why all this data was erased, he surely wished he could unsee it. That planet went through such hardships before it reached its normal, peaceful state...

Luckily, the majority of Naamah's recordings were from the more recent times and mostly had flexible people like Noah being trained by the robot.

Noah continued studying that planet, really enjoying the better part of the content. It gave him many ideas for his own training, he even wondered how tight he could fasten his belt and discovered that the pressure was giving him nice sensations on the abdomen and hips, the hard belt felt like an improvement to the body and since that day Noah started tight-belting his waist whenever he wasn't practicing contortion.

Some months passed and Noah already got to know all of Naamah's memories by heart, all the people in them seemed like his close friends, he knew everyone by name and rewatched his favorite moments of their training almost all the time, including their conversations with Naamah and each other. It was uplifting somehow to hear people talk and Noah kept forgetting they're just recordings.

One day he suddenly received a strange message from the ship's mainframe, signalling that they're "approaching the colony". The mainframe also unlocked some instructions for Noah, they stated that now that he was 18 years old he had to take full responsibility for "the mission". Him and Naamah would have to take care of dozens of other clones and raise them as new settlers on this colony they were approaching.

The mainframe explained that Noah was born 18 years before the arrival on purpose, so he could help with the mission in due time. Unfortunately the ship could not afford to feed more than one human over the period of 18 years due to the lack of resources, however, very shortly Noah would have a bigger company than he could imagine.

Noah was absolutely thrilled by the sudden news! Specially when the mainframe added one last touch to his body, the nanobot infusion that would keep his appearance the same to the end of his life, not only making him always look the same young but also making him pretty much immortal as long as he manages to avoid irreversible damage. The nanobots would detect and revert any slow processes such as illness or aging, heal wounds and even grow back limbs and organs as long as Noah manages to stay alive.

Meanwhile they approached the planet and Noah made his first steps in the new world. And so did the mainframe which had one more surprise for Noah, a secret chamber full of strange organic matter, which quickly grew into the planet's soil and apparently started growing underground.

The ship transformed itself into a large house and a group of big construction robots. Noah had no idea all these things were on board. The construction robots started working both on the surface and digging underground until they finished building a nice little village, as well as some strange underground facility.

The clones grew surprisingly quickly and soon the village was full of laughing and playing children. It was a huge step for Noah to go from knowing only Naamah to having such a large family, luckily all the kids were nice and smart. Noah knew from Naamah's memories how bad people can be. Machos, psychos, fanatics, bullies, mentors, egoists, all sorts of bored fucks pretending to be "depressed", playing a victim, acting holier than thou, etc. Noah was happy none of the children showed a single shade of that.

Noah was surprised that only one kid seemed to be another clone of himself, while the rest were different and unique. After some time he realized that the other kids look very familiar, like the very young versions of the people trained by Naamah in his memories.

The kids loved Noah's stretching exercises as well as the tight belt he was wearing for several hours a day to train his waist. They always tried to mimic him and Noah tried to share the best knowledge from his own practice.

The commune that started with Noah and a dozen children, soon began getting regular additions. More children were born a couple of years later, some of them looked the same as the children already born previously. Noah counted 22 unique patterns in total. As the settlement grew, robots and strange humanoid spawns took care of its safety and well-being.

Later a group of clones was taken to the underground facility and never returned. Noah was worried but the mainframe explained to him that they were taken to be incorporated into "The System", something that according to the mainframe had even better conditions than anything on the surface, however, there were very strict requirements for those who could be taken underground. Since then the mainframe regularly chose some of the clones to join this underground System.

Noah started to understand why it was his particular clone pattern that was chosen to lead the main settlement. Something in his personality made him very obedient, he looked up to the mainframe as a superior and never doubted its decisions. He could live with the fact that the undeground needed some human resources too, even though he sometimes wanted to know how his fellow clones were doing down there. Not that he had any doubts but he was curious what's it like underground because it had been sealed since the first days on this planet.

His attempts to hack into some of the terminals were fruitless and he figured that the only way to know what's it like, was to be taken by the System itself, even though he realized it meaned to never return to the surface again.

He gave himself a long while to come up with the decision but as the overworld settlement was doing great and he had several clones, any of them good enough to replace him, so he felt like his life would be incomplete without ever getting to know what's it like down there.

He asked the mainframe to consider him as a candidate to join the System. After some processing the mainframe granted him the permission and transfered all his special privileges to his other clone. Noah didn't expect it would be so quick and easy, no questions asked. He joined the next group of clones who were taken to the System. Fadeout, credits roll...