The blue planet and its blue moon grew as Flash approached them. He tracked the cloud patterns and mapped the surface. He also gathered data on surface temperatures, in deciding where to touch down.
For so long, he had been floating through space in the biosphere of the tiny mother ship. The thought of a planet like Earth filled him with joy. He looked at the blue dot on his screen and superimposed on it all of his memories and dreams. The very thought of filling his lungs with free atmosphere filled him with nostalgia. Of sitting in the shade of a tree, stepping out into a rainstorm or viewing the heavens from under the canopy of air. Things he had once, in another world, taken for granted, he now craved.
He wanted a new beginning, or at least another attempt to appreciate those things that used to be so familiar as to be overlooked. He dreamed of landing on this planet and finding there the things he once dismissed. His parents. The way the ground naturally gave way to vegetation. How clouds could blot out stars and even galaxies. How gravity held him down.
Of course he expected this world to contain things unlike any he had seen before. Perhaps they would be things that were once on earth… before man… before any of the major events that resulted in mass extinctions. But he also hoped to find something familiar.
Even ancient man left messages of things that once were. Including images depicting beings coming from space… From other worlds… Just as he was doing now.
He pulled the Ololian book down from its place on the shelf and opened the last pages. There, he saw not only an image of his chosen planet and its vibrant moon, but also a picture of himself looking at the image in the book. If only the book could tell him the next chapter now! But that was not the way it worked.