[Survey] Survey 001: Ice Cream Fruit?

“ARC surveys, huh?”

Nashan lays down his tablet on the kitchen counter, blowing a loose strand of hair out of his face as he gazes upon his most recent notification. Callum perks up from the couch nearby as he hears his brother speak, eyes glazing before recognition fills them, “Oh- yeah! That’s a new thing the Xenopology Department is up to! It doesn’t sound much like work if you ask me.”

“Not to you maybe, but can you even remember anything you liked eating since you’ve been spawned that didn’t feel totally new?” Nashan spits with distain, narrowing his eyes at his tablet before fixing on Callum’s dumbfounded stare. He raises his hands slightly as if in surrender, “I’m just saying, how can they rely on accurate results when everything our predecessors would’ve eaten was wiped away on our now barren planet?” He crosses his arms and looks away huffily, “They’d have better luck testing the ashes.”

“Hey, don’t be like that! Maybe they’re not trying to get back what the planet had before, but new things that our current species likes!” Callum puts a finger to his chin thoughtfully, pursing his lips, “Actually, do you think they could grow fruits that taste like ice cream if I told them that’s what I liked?” Nashan groaned, rolling his eyes before storming out of the living room and back to his bedroom.

Callum didn’t understand, he just didn’t get it! Plant life was a delicate thing! They could joke and suggest all they wanted, but at the end of the day their food source would have to be one that was sustainable in an ecosystem! It would be like planting spice plum trees and then being surprised  when the forest was covered in flies. It just wasn’t something to be trifled with, and the insinuation that the department was taking suggestions from any Xero about what types of food to recreate on the planet made him anxious. He really, truly wanted to live on their planet again, even if he didn’t know a thing about their predecessors or what wiped them out in the first place. He just wanted to have a home of their own, and be able to cultivate life on it himself. What if they messed it up? What if when they returned and tried to live with the land once again, their ecosystem turned on them?

With a heavy sigh, Nashan threw himself onto his bed, spiraling into an existential crisis for the second time that day. It wasn’t until he heard a tiny voice speaking that he raised his head to search for it. He spots his television, the small screen displaying a cooking show he’d left on at a very low volume.

Go figure.

As he pushes himself up from the bed, he moves to turn the screen off, pushing a button and watching the screen go blank. He has a thought seconds before the chef on screen disappears… if the Xenopology Department would listen to any  Xeros about what their favorite foods were, why not him? Why shouldn’t he submit for the survey if he was so passionate about it? He liked cooking, he liked growing food-producing plants- he was the perfect candidate!

With that, he sprinted back out of his room in search of his tablet, ready to write a lengthy essay on how he believed their food sources should impact the ecosystem.

Callum, on the other hand, simply wrote “Ice Cream Fruit” in the empty box, and smiled at the thought.