A Decent Land: An Anthology of Arks #4

Brief biographies of the first forty ships to arrive in the system Mammaria.

Part One of this anthology is available here. Links to the remainder of A Decent Land can be found in this collection.

16. The Gallery

For several generations — at the start of our journey — art was abandoned; culture was scrubbed. Residential arks were stocked with a digital library of classics to browse, but expression dried up without the materials (or time) for talent to thrive. Graphite for pencils, or anything similar, was just an indulgent expenditure.

Music survived — even the cheapest of flutes provide a scale to play. Feet and claps are suitable drums, and throats can warble a melody. Painting, sculptures, light-works and any conventional form of physical art died out as necessity blackened our fingers with excessive toil and science.

We lived on our own meagre stock of supplies, with no guarantee we’d replace them. Computing power was heavily rationed, tuned to movement and military. No-one installed any software for art, though some used geometry programs to generate fractals and woven parabolas.

Upon those mathematical easels, we slowly tempered solutions. An old, non-functioning chatbot — built to help…