[Week Six] Blind they are

The planet Ferrous
translated from the native ferrican
Written by an unknown Ferrizen

History of Ferrous

New archeological evidence discovered early last year dates the time of arrival as over ten thousand years ago. It is believed that at that time, a bird from the sky, which came from a different world, carried several settlers to Ferrous. The archeologists have found what they say is a metallic bird or a sky ship. This vessel could hold about five hundred Ferrizens. Later research discovered that it crashed on our world and that perhaps only a few survived the impact. It has been confirmed that they have a written language, similar in many ways to ours. It took linguists several months to translate the text but we now believe it is complete. It seems that they named our world Ferrous because it has a reddish color when seen from the ?outer universe?. Much of their documentation does not make any since to us. However we are still searching for other messages by the ancients.

This is a most controversial theory which has been accepted by none of the prominent universities. This theory does seek to explain our current genetic disorders which plague our nation. Blindness is a disease inflicted upon about half of our population. The settler theory does explain the reason for why this disorder is so common. Genetic samples were taken from several of the mummified corpses, it seems that perhaps a few of the survivors had a recessive allele which causes blindness. We had always assumed that blindness was a regular phenomena which occurs to the unholy.

This new find dramatically changes the way we look at our world and our civilization. The STATE will not accept these theories. Scientific Research Religion (SRR) has ordered that all records of this scientific expedition be expurgated from the press, the Chairman of the SRR has gone so far as to call the new findings a ?hoax?. This short introduction will probably never be published in the scientific journals, if it was I could face criminal prosecution by the SRR and STATE. I am however inclined to write several of the findings as it may help generateeeeee

Note on Text: It is believed that the unknown author of this text was apprehended and taken into custody by authorities while writing this article.






An account of the political, economic and social structure of the planet Ferrous
written by Setton Abris 1377
of the University of the Atlantic, planet Earth

Since the dawn of the human race, man has strived forward into unknown lands in search of wealth and power. Our search for this has lead us into the stars. About thirty thousand years ago we first ventured into our planet?s orbit. What is most interesting is what happened ten thousand years ago with what we call the Ferrous Experiment. We crashed a ship of children onto a distant world in the Alpha Centauri system. In the skies above this planet we have thousands of satellites monitoring their every move and watching their progress as a civilization. We sent down about 400 children. In the crash landing, almost all of them were killed. Four children survived and were the foundation for this new society. They were illiterate and two of them had a recessive allele that causes blindness. They ventured out of the ruins of their ship. Taking with them their supplies, they ventured into the heat of what we call the red desert. For several hours they hiked until they settled in a jungle.

For the next ten thousand years we have watched. The first few generations lived peacefully in that jungle, which they named Matis. As their population slowly grew, supplies in this small oasis began to run out. Conflict between different groups grew and eventually separate tribes were formed.

One jungle was not enough and the ferrizens as we popularly refer to them as began to become territorial. It was a savage world of conflict. One tribe settled areas on a norther lake. They became prosperous, their hunting techniques improved. Another tribe was completely