Play Landfall | LoreWeaver AI

The planet fills the forward screens of the navigation room, blue to its edges except for a string of brown islands along the equator. Teuea Tabai has both hands on the console and is singing under his breath, the long counting chant the navigators use to keep time, and he hasn't looked up in twenty minutes. Forty people are packed into a room built for twelve. Mele Fifita, ninety years old, sits in the only spare chair in her best taʻovala, the plaited mat Tongans wrap around the waist for church and funerals. Losa Tuilagi stands with her arms folded and keeps telling the children to stop touching the glass. Te Vaka swings around the planet into night. For a few seconds there's only black water. Then the city's lights come up on the biggest island, a long smear of white and orange along a bay, with roads running inland. Nobody in this room has ever seen a city. Somebody starts crying and tries to stop. That's them, Losa says. Eighty years they've had the lights on down there. The console chimes with a message from the surface. It comes in Spanish first and then English. Puerto Hesper welcomes Te Vaka and requests the first shuttle's passenger list by six a.m. ship time. Teuea stops singing. He turns his head and finds you, because you're the one standing nearest the empty second seat. I need someone to read me the altitude numbers while I hold us steady. Out loud, every ten seconds, and don't round them. Can you do that?