Proxima Centauri

My face used to be blue and dark, while I had long black hair.  I worked as a scientist on a small mining outfit orbiting the Goldilocks zone of Alpha Centauri, near Proxima.  The corridors were long and white, my stateroom dark and adorned with a few paintings along with collected swords from wars that had long gone under and into peace.  My research centered around the human periodic table of elements, as an alien to Earth, finding out which elements were conducive to peaceful living and abundant wealth in terms of materials.  I had a few volumetric flasks and vapor shields, some copper ore, mingled with the fundaments of orbiting asteroids.  What struck me about the community then and now was its dark shadows mingled with contrast of moody colors, white hallways for official business like recieving transcripts from radio waves that traveled through interstellar dust, broadcasts for new assignments.  My name was Lisa there, which is a human woman's name, but applied to me then as a male.

Some of the ore resided outside the fundamental underpinnings of human science.  A human scientist would call them exotic matters, or for that matter, it might be an analogy to something out of a video game.  Each one appeared mysteriously beautiful, dodging the underpinnings of a nineteenth century Russian's elaboration on a chemical system in the periodic table of elements.  I was really not interested in investigating, but would stare at the samples, filled with wonder, shocked that they were more beautiful than my eyes when I looked in the mirror.  Earth seemed lacking, but I recieved word after writing off human chemistry as gibberish that I was to be stationed there in the future for further research.

The mining colony was running out of water, needing constant supplies of it to keep drill bits from overheating as it would bore into the Proxima asteroid, imploring for more ore.  Plans were arranged to capture a small comet, but the heat generators of the colony proved far too inadaquete to melt the comet ice into water, so mining operations were suspended and the old plant was blown up.  I felt sad to see it go, it had been my old home, but what lingered in the back of my mind concerned those white hallways, all the light, the contrast between the official corridors and the colorful aspects of the mining station and it's town, which ended up abandoned due to drought.

Stationed on Earth, I determined a massive problem with the human periodic scale.  The perspectives of analysis brought from that table created warfare in violent reactions, which had been hinted at in Proxima but which had gone undiscovered due to our low oxygen environment.  As soon as I stationed myself on Earth, my alien face that had been dark and blue turned a whitish pink from all that sun, poisoned by nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide.  I realized after I landed that most of my studies had lain in ignorance of change, that science could shift from observer to observer, from race to race.  The irony of the situation lay in the fact that Earth had an abundant water supply, whereas the Proxima asteroid had none, leaving me to quietly ruminate my thoughts about the inherent misplaced value of industry, yet however, the natives of Earth placed a primacy on the values of warfare, which had been forebidden as the blackest sin in that research module.