We, The Watchers

That first meal feels a million miles away but it is certainly much farther by now.

The golden crisp of potatoes, the simple beauty of a well-done pork chop, the intoxicating waft of burgundy, hell, even a steamed green bean met my taste buds like a word from God. After all, he was the only one who knew how long it’d been since I’d had real food. There were many things to remember from that first meal. Adrian’s face. He was nearly bursting with anticipation finally- finally- having company to share a meal with after his interminable time awake came to a sweet end. The old farmhouse. Slatted windows let in a sweet summer’s breeze, a low elkhorn chandelier flooded the weatherboard dining room with warm light. The setting was nearly perfect for a meal of dignified, rustic simplicity.

Yes, there was plenty to be remembered about that first meal aboard the C.R.S. Delaney’s Folly. But what I mostly remember is fighting tears back at just how goddamned good a steamed green bean could be when it was the first solid food to hit your tongue out of cryo. That, and swimming in astonishment that this scene of country contentment was all just a ruse built to preserve our sanity as we hurled through the inky blackness of space at a doughty third of the speed of light.

It’s funny how much I could wax poetic about my own fractured memory when I’m finishing a piece. Even paltry little stool, hobbled together from offcuts of grander projects and the few good bits of timber I could coax out of the biofactory this week, but at least I’d finally have somewhere to sit when I milked the cow. I suppose that was the intention though, when you fall into the meditation of working with your hands it’s easier to forget the impossibility of the task set before you. It couldn’t last forever though, each evening I’d still have to get out and switch the pastures over this evening before the cow clips the grass all the way down to dust.

What an odd proposition really, I’d never reckoned to be a farmer in this life and it took literally taking to the stars to be thrust into this antiquated ideal. In many ways, it’s entirely gobsmacking that earth ever was like this quiet, open, bountiful. They say your memory is a bit slow on the uptake when you come off the ice, but god, half of what I could remember was running frantically to dive into some apartment block before the great ochre wall of a haboob rolled up the front range and blew our neighborhood just that much more flat. All I’d ever seen of the wide world of gastronomy was the outside of some hydroponic blocks and the inside of a ration bag. Now here I am, off to seed some new colony an unfathomable distance from home and trying to devise a new plan to keep this next tomato harvest from going off in storage. For a ship with a good chunk of the totality of human knowledge and experience in its archives, you’d think the Delaney would have been of more help.

But that was the modus operandi for the old girl, non-intrusion, get to work, figure it out yourself. Thank the stars for Adrian’s bottomless patience in showing me the ropes that first week- here’s how you rotate the paddocks to keep the livestock rotation working, the garden is out back here’s what to plant next to keep the beds rich and yourself fed, oh, and don’t forget to check the biofactory twice a day to see what the ship has sent you, it doesn’t always stay on at room temp- I staggered through his measured instruction in a cryogenic stupor. But he’s been back in the freeze for years now and all I have left of him are scribbled notes, a battered copy of The American Gardener, and a week’s worth of good company. For all the good it did me.

In hindsight Adrian’s forbearance seemed downright divine. Years of trials and tribulations on the farm. Years of mite infestations and missed harvests. Years in the workshop passing the long evening hours trying desperately to keep my hands busy. Years of not but my own company and I’d likely explode with a fountain of words given somebody, anybody to talk to. But he had pulled me off the ice, given me plenty of time to dethaw, held me up and fed me slurry to get me at least semi-mobile, he had given me space and support and a dose of quick wit to get me through those hellish first days out of cryogenic stasis. And when I finally felt up to a chat his stories and questions and musings were contained and precise and simple. All that and it was still the most disorienting, stressful week of my life.

Once we got to talking we covered everything. Where had we grown up? Me: Denver, in the tenements north of the city just close enough to the mountains to harvest rainfall when we were so blessed and sell it for a couple of extra rations. Him: Southside Chicago, worked in the family business of hydroponic soy keeping bellies full if pockets empty. Did we have any family doing work stints on the Folly? Me: I thought so, my little sister had signed up together at the local recruitment center and they’d said we’d be deployed together but since we both went on the ice immediately afterward I wasn’t sure. Him: he thought his mom made it on this ship as well, but years of searching the cryo bays hadn’t turned up her chamber, still he held out hope that she’d be there when we finally wound our way through the stars to our destination. What did we hope this new planet would be like? Me: I hadn’t the foggiest idea, but anything was better than no work and endless choking dust storms. Him: he’d look around wistfully at our little plot with the paddocks rising away into the distance, I hope it’s just like this.

The deal was five years. Five years working aboard the Folly for passage to a new home where we were told work and water would be in abundance. Five years of our own, biological lives to “maintain and crew” the ship even if most of the time it feels like I’m awake merely to bear witness to this grandest of human endeavors. Five years, what a joke. It only took a few months for time to lose all meaning to me.  Five years though, for access to Eden.

On balance, the work is probably fair for the price. My sister and I both were likely applicants for the Delaney Corp. program given training as mechanics and a lifetime living at the forefront of a world of scarcity. As automated as the runnings of the ship undoubtedly were there are some jams you just need a clever monkey to get out of, even a pseudo-omniscient ship-encompassing AI knows that. I reckon that I spent about one day in ten actually servicing the ship, you can have every self-repairing program and roboticized system that the smartest engineers on the planet can dream up, but we were not bound for earth, nor anywhere remotely near it, and out in the wild black yonder you need the flexibility that comes from two dexterous hands and a brain built for spatial reasoning. And inevitably things went wrong. Leaks in the water plant; degraded components in the biofactory; fried sensors, wires, and generators; you name it time takes its inexorable toll on us all.

---

I live on a haunted ship.

The C.R.S. Delaney’s Folly may well be the pinnacle of all human engineering- no comet harvester or planet jumper- this was a colonial ship. A ship built to carry the human enterprise forth into the yawning eons of time and space to come. Better off into the great unknown than to admit defeat and perish with a planet that may be dying much sooner than later. Built at the behest of the formidable Yvette Delaney, fourth familial head of that proud oligarchical venture, Delaney’s Folly was, in fact, one of several score in a matching set (and certainly the most self-deprecating of the bunch). Because if you have the money to buy one ship to spread the virtue of your family’s corporation into the cosmos, you probably want a couple for redundancy’s sake. I was told they modeled her after prototype asteroid colonies, hollowing out a big potato of rock setting it to spinning and then they strapped on some thrusters and started selling tickets for a one-way ride.

In all seriousness, the Folly was a ship I’d come to admire, love, and fear in equal measure. Built to hold two million sleepers in cryogenic stasis, be completely self-sufficient for millennia of travel if necessary, protect and carry the totality of human knowledge, oh and contain all the supplies to start a brand new civilization from scratch when we finally got where we were going, it certainly was a ship worthy of admiration. Almost entirely automated in it’s piloting, navigation, and maintenance routines the Folly was certainly a paragon of trim efficiency in nearly all of its construction.

As such, it always cracked me up a bit, sitting on the porch of the farmhouse, how much space had been dedicated to keeping active crew awake. Was it really so hard to figure out a way to close the maintenance loop in the water plant, was the biofactory really so complex that internal robotics couldn’t self-repair, were conditions really so harsh out on the ablative ice that drones couldn’t maintain the hull sensors? Or was it just in some bout of philosophical self-doubt that the powers that be wanted to keep someone awake to simply make sure the ship didn’t blink out of existence the second we all went down to sleep? After all travelling away from home at a third of light with only a vague itinerary, who would know if we disappeared? Who would care?

At any rate, as best I could figure maybe a twentieth of the internal space of the ship was allocated for my homestead, holed as it was amidst a near-solid tangle of technology and supplies on all sides. A few acres of open space on the inside of the hull allowing it to sit at 1g was all it took to keep our primal brains content. At least content enough not to off ourselves too frequently before the end of our allocated work stints. Too many worker deaths would be unacceptably inefficient. 

To be fair, the farm certainly had its charms. Enough room to set the house up on a slight rise affording an expansive view over the paddocks and out to the treeline that obscured where the walls came down. Enough height for shockingly realistic simulated weather patterns; while it mostly tended towards the pleasant freshness of a warm spring day, many evenings I fell asleep to the soft patter of rain on the tin roof and a handful of mornings I even awoke to a fog so thick I had to grope about blind to find the cow for her morning milking. Although whether these weather phenomena were to satisfy my own psychological need for variety patronizingly supplied by the ship’s AI or if they served some loop-closing purpose in the maintenance of the farm ecosystem I could not have said.

Yes, my interstellar acreage was a pretty good setup. If you just stepped out on the porch you could just about imagine that you were looking out on a fine bit of Missouri prairie on fresh May morning. I tried not to take it too hard that they’d almost certainly strip it down to its elemental components and convert the space into some sort of staging area once we finally settled on a new planet. It was best to not get too attached to things out in space.

But for all that, the ship certainly felt haunted at nearly every turn. The self-maintenance routines, drones, and robotics that pervaded the rest of the ship remained completely hidden and certainly didn’t truly stop at the edge of the farm. To the ship’s AI I was just another cog in the machine, just a part of the maintenance system that needed an awful lot of space in order to work. As such it certainly kept a close eye on me at all times, monitoring my physical and psychological health and ensuring I’d be ready should an emergency repair ever arise. But still the homestead was my place and the ship mostly left me to my own devices, or kept it’s interventions carefully invisible when the need called for it.  Enough to give me a sense of agency, but not so much that I might accidentally take myself out of commission. I was a human tool, honed by an unknowable intelligence.

Off in the far-flung reaches of the ship, it was easy to see how it kept itself running- self-repair robotics and the like- even if I never actually saw the routines in action. Better to give the human crew less to anthropomorphize and keep the robots hidden from view. Hell, they didn’t even give us pigs. Too smart, too social. You could make friends with a pig given enough time; instead they stuck me with a cow so dull I swear it may well be the only robot I’d seen since I left earth and a handful of chickens to keep me busy, fed, and waking up on time. Beyond the walls of the farm, the maintenance routines were simply more utilitarian and speedy. If I left tools out at a worksite, I’d find them reorganized in the repair center the next time I went out. If I left food scraps out in a mess hall I’d decided to patronize for the afternoon they’d be gone off to the reclimator within minutes of me leaving my seat. If it dragged a bit of dirt out past the farm’s threshold in my boots it’d be swept away almost before I could turn around.

All this was just practical. Messy tools could jam a moving part. Food scraps had real value once they made it through the reclimator and into the biofactory. Dirt. Shit, dirt caused problems at nearly every level of a spaceship’s workings. So the question was why? Was all this risk, all this space, all this ecological ingenuity just to keep the crew sane? Did years of Delaney Corp. testing really reveal that several acres was the minimum viable habitat for a solitary human crew? Or were we here as mice in a maze, part of some experiment of how productive one uneducated schulb could make a few acres of land with a crash course on rotational grazing and all the time in the new world? As with so much of my life amongst the stars, I was long on questions and short on answers.

In truth, becoming comfortable with withheld information was part and parcel of signing on for a work stint on a Delaney Corp. colony ship. Adrian, my sister, me, whoever comes after me, and whoever comes after them, and on and on ad infinitum are just cogs, given the absolute bare minimum of information as any more would almost certainly stir up trouble. Sure, when I signed on at the Denver recruitment office the plan was to send the Folly off towards Trappist 1, to explore its presumptive hotbed of terrestrial planets and look for a place to set up roots. With acceleration times and a top speed just under 35% of light, we could make it to the system in under 200 years of ship time. If that was the case, I was told, the majority of work recruits would actually remain asleep, lucking their way into a free trip to the new world. If that is the case, well then I’m just an unlucky draftee who gets the pleasure of a solitary five years of waking flight time.

But, as I was told in pages of legal boilerplate, if the ship’s governing panel deemed that none of the planets around Trappist 1 were suitable for a new colony the sleepers would remain on ice, we’d stick around for a year or two to harvest a likely looking asteroid, and be on our merry way to one of a dozen other candidate systems in our dedicated quadrant of space. They built the Folly with an upper unsupported travel time of nearly 5,000 years for a reason. Even with home system-spanning satellite telescope arrays, hunting for exoplanets was still a rough science at best, and all we got was a rough roadmap. If the mission designers were honest though, it didn’t really matter if we found a new home near Trappist 1 or on the fifth system we explored or five hundredth. By harvesting systems for fuel and what precious little other resources the ship may have burned through over the years, we could explore indefinitely until a suitable planet fell in our sights. 

It wasn’t about building a cohesive empire, it was about following our deepest biological imperatives. To explore and settle. To adapt and build. To give the human race one more foothold in the interminable race against extinction. Sure, someday post-humans with faster engines and longer lives may figure out a way to knit together some kind of a working interstellar society in some dense corner of space, but that was not our role. We were set on this grand course to keep the spark of human intelligence alight in the face of a vast, uncaring universe. For hundreds of years, we had turned our eyes and ears out into the cosmos looking for other signs of life and heard only deafening silence. But the one solution to Fermi’s vexing paradox that Yvette Delaney could not stomach was that intelligent species may evolve, and flourish, and die in their little corner of the universe because interstellar travel was simply too hard. That humanity for all its triumphs and moxie would ultimately be snuffed out by cowardice.

That was where the thinking got a bit spooky though. Was I one of the first few to take my watch? Or one of the last? I was told that in order to keep the venture profitable a maximum of 200 berths would be allocated to work crew allowing for 1,000 years of flight on the base crew. Clearly, it was suicide from an Earth-centric perspective to step aboard this ship. Even in the best-case scenario, everyone I’d ever met on Earth would be dead before we arrived and signaled back home. What concerned me though, was what awaited after my Earthly death. Was I simply living a feverish transition on my way to a blessed afterlife? Or would the worst happen, and this was just the beginning? Did I end my life on earth only to find purgatory deep in interstellar space?

Say we blew right by Trappist 1, no suitable planets no need to really even look for resources at that point. We’d just be getting started, no problem. With plenty of other leads, they’d rouse another watcher, strategically not tell them that we’d just passed a system by, and carry on. No need to take two million people out of cryo just to tell them we weren’t staying. But what if we were well beyond that? What if I was the last of the dedicated watchers and we still are no closer to finding a new home? Well, the Delany Corp. legal team had an answer for that. They’d begin rousing draftees for another stint on the farm, with a few low-fare passengers mixed in to extend flight-time potential. On and on we’d go, it’d make no matter to those in cryo they’d just keep on sleeping. 

That’s what haunted my dreams though. I do my watch, go back on the ice, wake up eons later no idea how much time had truly passed and serve again. I knew this was my first time as a homesteader, but had no guarantee it would be the last.  An extra stint or two on the farm wouldn’t be the end of the world, but with a bit of hindsight clarity that’s beginning to look like the best-case scenario. If we have to find through brute force exploration that Earth truly is a treasured gem, unique in the cosmos, my stints will just roll together as time takes its due my remaining years. A never-ending limbo of cryo sickness, solitude, and eventually senility. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

--

Your entire life’s work, that was all it took for a berth aboard the Folly.

And your life too, in a way, I suppose. But hey, interstellar travel ain’t cheap and for myself and these two million frozen mummies sailing through the cosmos it actually seemed like a pretty good deal. At least when we signed up.

Delaney Corp. was naturally going to be the first to have a bite of the spacefaring apple. Founded by Josiah Delaney in the wake of the Second Troubles who fled his homeland and headed to Mexico City to try his luck with the burgeoning Low Earth orbit transportation industry there. The company initially rose to prominence as the first government contractor for moon mining operations before leapfrogging to asteroid harvesting and now interplanetary colony founding. It’s funny how success breeds success when you have an infinite frontier for expansion. Their proud hereditary lineage was maintained through generations of careful breeding, enhanced education, no small amount of illicit gene editing, and good old fashioned dose of latino machismo. It certainly had become the most trusted brand in space. So when their current scion, Yvette, with her dark stern face and mind exquisitely tuned for the vacuum of space took to the net to announce an interstellar venture, the world hardly batted an eye.

By the time the project was announced, we were told, it had already been underway for several decades. All of Delaney’s prototype asteroid colonies were not in fact exclusively meant to expand living space around our star, but were also the seeds that would help carry humanity off to new ones. Yvette herself would be aboard the flagship, the Delaney’s Fable, as they struck a course towards Alpha Centauri just to show it could be done. What’s more, unlike the other ships, they would return. That to me showed the character of the whole family more than generations of success and public relations ever could. They’d spend untold fortunes financing this grand expedition, seed the ships with lesser hangers on of the family empire and any other suckers they could sell a ticket to, and chart a one-way course into the cosmos. But when it came to the head of the family? Well, they couldn’t send her off into oblivion. Better to show her commitment by being the first to explore a new system, and then head back home to collect her honors and any interest that had accrued over her twenty-year voyage. Even if the Alpha Centauri almost certainly had no suitable planets for colonization, it meant very little to Yvette I’m sure. She’d simply sleep, enjoy a bit of leisure aboard the ship as they approached the system, plant a flag on some suitable patch of planet, and head off. I’m sure her old job would be waiting when she got back.

That was 17 years before the departure of the Folly. As I sat with the Delaney recruiters surrounded by the fanciest office in which I’d ever set foot, gazing out through the haze trying to pick out the silhouette of the Rockies, a they happily informed me that the Fable was making excellent headway and would be back ahead of schedule. I guess the flag planting was a speedy business. By the time they made it back into the system, though, I was already aboard the Folly and on ice. But once we were through with the obligatory idol worship our conversation turned to business and quickly folded back on me and what could bring to the program. The recruiters a pair of hawks peering into the depths of my soul and conscience for inscrutable flaws.

Honestly, it could not have been the interview that landed me the berth. I found my way there a few months after my mother had disappeared into a web of opiate addiction from which I did not believe she’d emerge this time, and it was all my sister and I could do to scrape together enough work as irrigation mechanics to keep a leaky roof over our heads. I did not relish the prospect of weathering a drenching winter in our shabby excuse for an abode. Between that and an array of lecherous aunts and uncles seemingly hellbent on pulling me into the same trap in which my mom had been ensnared, stepping aboard the Folly and saying a not-so-fond farewell to Earth seemed like the best-case scenario for me. Even if it meant leaving sis behind.

All of this I stammered and tried to relate to the recruiters in such a way as to make me seem sufficiently desperate for a work stint -effectively condemning myself to at least five years of solitary confinement- while not seeming like too much of an addiction and depression risk. I do not reckon that I did very well with my pitch, stumbling over my life story and summarily leaving out anything of value I may actually bring to the ship. Nonetheless, I was hurried off into a tumult of mental, emotional, and physiological aptitude tests that brought me to my wit’s end. But when they spat me out the other side with an offer and asked me to bring Abella in the next day because they wanted to examine her as a potential recruit as well I’d never been so happy.

So Abella and I both were accepted, and allegedly both aboard the Folly, I’m sure not because of any hidden intellectual or physiological laurels we possessed. Rather because of some combination of our youth, rudimentary mechanical acumen, and the fact that we were in dire enough straits to eagerly leave the entirety of our lives behind. Somehow we ticked enough of the right boxes in the crew selection AIs protocols deeming us a high survival likelihood for our work stint. Or maybe they just needed two more run-of-the-mill lab rats to put through a series of space-bound experiments. One way or the other it was abundantly clear from go that we wouldn’t have a spare dime to contribute to the mission hence why landing a coveted maintenance berth felt like winning the lotto.

This was not the case for most of the souls aboard. Delaney’s interstellar venture started internally. Supplying ample work for a ballooning and increasingly cumbersome family structure, it allowed all the grandchildren, step-aunts, and cousins-twice-removed respectable positions within the new project. Then it expanded to other great oligarchical families of our storied era, trading partnerships in technology and resource for positions of authority and high-value berths. Turns out with a couple of centuries of unrestricted bloat many of those late-capitalist familial heads were all too eager for a way to trim the fat in their respective organizations. Then it filtered down again to the growing mass of well-to-do families who saw their ruin coming in our rapidly collapsing ecosystems.

These were the bulk of passengers who slept their way through the stars. Whole families packed up neatly into rows of matching cryo caskets, hoping their luck would turn for the better on the new world. After all, if your family had come to expect a certain lifestyle afforded by a generation or two of prosperity, but your current business prospects were drying up as the great families sucked up every resource that wasn’t tied down, you really had two options. Fight the inevitable and most likely have to watch as all you hold dear collapsed and your once-proud name was subsumed into the churning masses of the global lower class. Oh, you’d survive, just long enough to see how deep the well of shame truly was and watch as ships holding the future of humanity packed up and headed on to new worlds. Or you could join the fleet. Liquidate all your holdings as tribute, or more likely just sell them directly to Delaney Corp., tell the kids to pack their things and jump aboard. If you were sufficiently rich there’d be zero chance you’d ever be awoken before reaching your new home, and I’m sure you would be guaranteed a similar level of status in the new economy with significantly more room for upward mobility. Crisis averted.

What few berths remained would be auctioned off amongst the upper echelons of academia. Double and triple doctorates, Nobel laureates, and research pioneers who saw their coming doom in the slow destruction of their fields, all scrambled to get aboard before they were left tutoring some local magnate’s progeny at best. If they were young and had a similarly gifted partner maybe they’d both score a spot, and make some new smart kids for the new world. More genius to help us survive.

But then, without fail, the last two hundred berths would be allocated to us, the maintenance crew, the watchers. A mere .1% of total occupancy left for us, but if you fell into the bottom 90% of global income this was your only way aboard. You should be grateful for the opportunity. We’d trade away years of our waking lives for the hope of a better future on the new world. There was seemingly no rhyme or reason to who made the cut. With acceptance rates so low, it was big news when someone in town made it aboard. Plenty of applicants more brilliant, highly-trained, creative, and hungry than Abella and I were unceremoniously turned away left to fight for scraps on Earth. And thus I was so guaranteed of my own mediocrity. If they were accepting Abella and I clearly the selection AI had its sights set on something other than a list of accolades and bona fide genius. Maybe they were after some inscrutable diversity for the new gene pool, maybe they wanted to test how people as mentally average as the extended families of the global elite would fare in the face of infinity, maybe mortality rates for a five-year solo work stint proved quite high in their experiments leading up to launch and some nebulous mental stability criteria won the day for us. Maybe we just got lucky.  The only discernible predictive factor were family ties. If your cousin made you were 25% more likely to go, if a brother or sister 75%, twins almost always went together, if they were both sufficiently eager to find a new life.

By the time I went on the ice Delaney Corp. had already selected more crew than would fit on their currently built ships. I was told Abella and I would be grouped together- if at all possible- and that we’d slot into some of the final berths of a ship that was nearing completion. But can you really trust a recruiter? For all I knew they kept us on ice for a couple of decades before splitting us up to make good on the bare minimum of their contractual obligations and shipped us off. For all I knew Abella was a couple of parsecs away and heading in the other direction. Hell, I didn’t even know the name of my new home until Adrian pulled me out of my casket with a wry smile and said ‘Welcome aboard the Folly amigo’. And somehow in spite of all that, leaving everyone I’d ever known for dead, groveling for what amounted to a prison sentence while elites paid top dollar for luxury berths, and flying devoid of any contextual information about where we were going or how far we’ve come, as I sat on the porch of the old farmhouse and looked out over the paddocks most days it seemed like a pretty good deal.

--

We live on a string of trinkets.

In all the vast tracts of the ship that I have explored over the years, my favorite place in all of outer space, undoubtedly, was the workshop. My place. How could it not be? It was my psyche wrought physical. Housed under a sloping roof behind the house with a sliding barn door it’s the only point of access, it would actually be fairly easy to overlook at first glance. You certainly wouldn’t expect it to be the center of all human sanity on this ship. Sufficient space to work on most projects I could dream up but not enough for any sort of untidiness, the workshop had cultivated its final form over the course of several months.

In the listless weeks after I put Adrian down to sleep, it took me a shockingly long time to even find my way into the workshop. I spent day after ceaseless day over tending the gardens and livestock, summoning the courage to leave the farm and explore some of the nearer reaches of the ship, and endlessly circling the paddocks along the treeline as I felt more and more certain that I wouldn’t survive my stint. Then, after a few weeks of beginning to see ghosts around every corner, I was caught out by a late afternoon thunderstorm and I ducked into the nearest door sliding back the big barn door and was confounded by what I saw. I hadn’t set foot in the shop but it looked altogether different than when I peered in as Adrian showed it to me. Previously the benches had been covered with canvasses and boards and papers, all covered in Adrian’s scrawling illustration, but as I looked in on that evening the benches were tidy and organized with sparse tooling from a myriad of different disciplines. I eyed it all cautiously as I paced over the weathered floorboards and came upon a stack of timber that stopped me in my tracks.

For my entire life, raw wood had been such a scarce commodity that most of what I had seen on Earth was repurposed, half-rotted, termite-riddled. Houses old enough to still have wood construction were coveted and jealously guarded usually by some well-to-do family. Indeed, while the construction of the farmhouse was by no means ornate the simple fact that it was almost all wood was striking. But a house built of wood still made sense to me some part of my cultural subconscious understood that houses were made of wood, but timber simply set in the corner to collect dust and await whoever may find a use for it bespoke an abundance I’d scarcely encountered in my life. No walk through the vast halls of the ship, no garden-grown meal, no time walking the paddocks made me as hopeful of a future of real prosperity as this humble pile of timbers. How absurd.

And so, head reeling, I picked up a stout plank and the whittling knife off the rack and ducked out onto the front porch. That evening all I made was a pile of shavings, simply savoring the feel and smell of fresh pine and the soul-satisfying scrape of a well-sharpened whittling knife as the rain softly pattered upon my tin roof and the universe fell away.

The next morning I went back to the workshop to return my knife and was surprised to find several others neatly aligned next to its spot on the rack as well as several new types of wood stacked neatly in the corner. I proceeded in this ritual every evening for weeks, at times trying to hew a fish, a mouse, a spoon, at others simply letting my hands work and my mind fall into quiet meditation. No ghosts could chase me here, on my deck, in the deepening twilight. 

Thus it went for several weeks, but real change in the workshop came when I began to change. After dozens of timbers wrought to nothingness, I awoke one morning determined to make something I could use. I had no skill for detailed work, but if I put my mind to it I could certainly make a stirring spoon, right? A little piece of myself to add to the kitchen battery. Several intent evenings later I walked back through the door of the house and added my new rough carved masterpiece to the collection of kitchen utensils. An inauspicious start for an aspiring woodworker, but a switch had flipped.

Now nothing was safe. I looked around the farmhouse and saw nothing but a series of projects. Ever since I’d first stepped through the front door the furnishings always felt jarringly futuristic to me, like some real estate agent had packed their showpieces in without much consideration for what the house itself represented. And it represented the value of handcrafted ingenuity. Sure I was just whittling spoons now, but with enough time I could replace all of every piece of glass and metal in the place with warm, hand-crafted wood. I strode over to the coffee table, it looked up glaringly mocking my ambition with its immaculate white glass surface, calling out my farce of a revelation, and I dragged it out to the porch and dumped it over unceremoniously to shatter in the yard below. It may take me years to replace it but I’d be damned if I was going to let that glossy table mock my progress.

Fortunately, the ship seemed more than happy with my new hobby. My tab, which theoretically had access to the entirety of the ship’s archives, usually stubbornly resisted many of my queries or only supplied the bare minimum of information. Now, when I opened it, troves of woodworking tutorials, projects, and introduction classes popped out begging to be used.

That was when the workshop became my own as well. In those halcyon days, nothing stayed the same. Whether it was my own frenetic rearranging of every supply into cohesive workspaces or the ships stealthy addition of tools and materials the shop was remade anew every day trying keep up with the growing stack of projects I began sketching into my tab. Neat stacks of wood of a dozen varieties I couldn’t name appeared in the corner. Planers, jointers, saws, clamps, and hammers appeared night after night fleshing out a toolkit to match my ambitions. The only thing the ship resisted, it seemed, were power tools of any description. The pinnacle of human technology had decided I had to do everything by hand, very well.

I started off simple and quick. Easy projects that still consumed nearly my entire day, a cutting board, some storage boxes, a myriad of kitchen utensils. The garden erupted into chaos and I missed the harvest on some squash Adrian had warned me about, while the cow bellowed her protest at my inattention. None of it mattered I was consumed. It wasn’t until my first attempt to replace my shattered coffee table that I really realized what I was getting into though. Even my rudimentary design took days and I struggled to construct and plane a suitable top, and then in an afternoon of frustration, I failed, again and again, to make sufficiently sturdy legs for even the most basic of use.

Around this time as well, the wood supply started to dry up as well. At first, I’d find new stacks of different woods every morning, and then once I had a collection the ship deemed sufficient I’d find replacements for whatever I used in the biofactory delivery box in the morning. But after a couple weeks the wood deliveries began getting interspersed with other deliveries citrus fruits (one of the few things I couldn’t grow in the gardens or orchard), vitamin supplements (surely to make up for the nutrients in whatever I killed most recently in the garden), even the odd steak (cultured, I suppose when the ship decided I needed a little protein boost), but mostly bags of non-descript biomass pulp to feed into my compost pile. Not so subtle hints that survival was not a given even on this abundant farm and that mother ship said I could only work on my projects once my chores were done. As my backstock of timber began to run dry, it became clear what I was up against. Interstellar space meant scarcity, even if it hid behind all this artifice. Work by hand, conserve your materials, measure twice cut once. Surely some Mennonite had snuck into the Delaney engineering team to enact their moral righteousness on us unsuspecting watchers.

It was right around the time that I first realized how truly scarce my supplies would be in the long run that the gifts began appearing. I awoke one bright morning to find a pair of handsome leather boots sitting on my wobbly coffee table with a note in a scrawling script. “Watch your feet when you turn the garden beds over. -Melissa”. I sat down, head swimming with the implications. I had never met any Melissa, never considered that my ship-supplied shoes would be insufficient once I had to start doing heavier jobs on the farm, never considered that I’d be anything other than alone in my long journey through the stars. But here, a stranger had reached across unknown eons of time to show that I was wrong on all fronts. Pulling them on for the first time I felt a shattering connection to someone I may never truly know. They fit perfectly and after a little break-in I was sure they’d feel like a second skin; the austere tapered design, even double stitching, rich red-hued leather all bespoke a labor of love I could scarcely conceive. Thank you, Melissa, whoever you are.

She must have learned an entire trade to leave these gifts behind. Cobbling, tanning, sewing, braiding, all would need to be mastered when she looked down dissatisfied with the shoes the ship had provided. I can’t imagine that the biofactory was much more helpful than spitting out some raw materials and letting her get to it. Although certainly, the ship had been complicit in this exchange as well, providing learning materials to her tab, letting her know my size, and cleverly delivering the boots to me just when I would need them most. It would’ve certainly been a daunting project as I can only imagine that she set out to make boots for all 200 of her fellow watchers once she got herself shod. A monumental effort, but then again we have nothing but time.

They turned out to be a thoughtful gift as well, turning aside my spade on more than one occasion that would’ve resulted in a broken toe as I turned the soil in the garden beds. But more than that, they helped me begin to cultivate a sense of place. The ship standard shoes may well have been spit directly out of the biofactory, canvas and laceless well suited for staying clean and journeying the miles of ship tunnels, but downright unwearable on the farm once I had a better option. My boots began to break in and feel like home just like the farmhouse and workshop did. Extensions of myself in the environment, helping me feel at peace in the face of so much strangeness.

The boots were far from the only gifts I received throughout the long years, although their delivery was altogether unpredictable. Soon after I broke in my boots I received sturdy canvas pants from a fellow named Tobias, and then work shirts and gloves from Chen completed my old-timey garb. But that was just the beginning. The workshop had once been outfitted for pottery throwing judging by my set of stoneware delivered to me from Manon, handsomely made to replace the clattering metal dishes that resided in the cabinets when I moved in. Then when my first piece of brie showed up in the biofactory delivery box with a note from Andreas that said: “Don’t worry I tested the stasis, it’s still good.” I damn near wept, having just come off a particularly hard harvest. A delicate wheel spun through yawning stretches of time. It was a full two years before my gift from Adrian appeared one morning leaning up against the counter, an austere framed watercolor of the Rockies reaching up into a dawn clearer than I’d ever seen, and a note that read “Chin up kid, you’re doing better than you know.” I could see the wry smile on his face just reading a few of his words.

So what would be my legacy? How could I become a member of this community that spanned interminable space and time? Clearly the ship had waited until I’d chosen some form of creative outlet, and I was almost certain that it wouldn’t retool the workshop much for me now that I was so well-appointed. So that was it then; I wouldn’t just replace a coffee table I’d shattered in a moment of giddy exuberance with some shabby creation. I would master this craft, and create furnishings worthy of this place, of this mission, of these people. These souls are torn apart by the sands of time and the gears of enterprise and yet in spite of it all, we fight to build a family.

--

A transformation occurs at the threshold.

Setting out from the porch of the old farmhouse a path leads through the garden beds and out into the paddocks. Acres of rolling verdant grasses stretch off covering the bulk of the homestead being variably used to raise chickens, feed the cow, or cultivate rich grasses to keep the ecosystem healthy. Off to the left the orchard stands covering a little rise with handsome rows of apple, peach, pear, and cherry, attesting the true age of this place. After a quarter-mile or so great stands of sycamore, oak, and willow rise up and shade the well-trodden path, these elegant giants line the entire outer wall of the homestead to make it look like it goes on forever. Until you duck into their shade, you’d almost swear it did. Then, under the canopy, a wooden bridge quickly leaps over a trickling stream that runs around the perimeter, and a riot of ferns and mosses before the path jogs between a pair of looming boulders. 

And then suddenly, jarringly, the whole artifice comes to an end. The walls that contain this whole biosphere stretch up, patterned at first to match the trees before fading into the sky and soaring high overhead into the clouds above. Here, a high doorway arches open onto a hallway of polished stone and speckled plaster that stretches interminably off into the distance. Doorways diminishing in the warm light as the hall marches the long kilometers back to the stern of the ship. Beyond this threshold lies all that the C.R.S. Delaney’s Folly has to offer, life, wonder, technology beyond your wildest dreams and somewhere out there hope for the entire human species. But here, at the threshold, a physical, emotional, and spiritual transformation occurs.

As you step through the silent air curtain the temperature drops, not concerned with maintaining a thriving ecosystem the ship only adds enough atmosphere and heat for short-term crew habitability. All other parts of the ship are in airless void, conserving energy and atmosphere until they are needed. The soft scuff of the dirt path and the springy step of clipped turf are replaced by the hard clack of polished concrete. Only sound-deadening plaster and warm glowing lights along the baseboard keep the halls from becoming utterly tomb-like. Here I’d step out of my boots and into my ship shoes, partly to not sully the ship with my dirt and partly to not sully my good dirt with the sterility of the ship. Here at the threshold I transform, from a human with purpose into a cog in an inconceivably grand machine.

In truth, I loathe this transformation. I’d spend days, weeks at a time going no further than this, content to work the farm, continue my projects, and forget the universe. A stark contrast to how things began. In my first days alone the homestead felt utterly suffocating, I’d pace around the treeline dismayed at the size of my living quarters and head off into the belly of the ship, hellbent on exploring every nook and cranny. I never even came close. I’d learned the hard way that the ship is about ten kilometers in circumference with no direct route around after one afternoon walk turned into a near 24-hour escapade, following the glow of open corridors in a winding path around the hull. To be sure, the ship’s AI was always handy with navigation on my tab, but would summarily refuse to let me use any of the onboard trains or travelators when I was out for my own recreation.

But those walks grew less and less frequent over the first months and stopped altogether after my first year. Out in the ship I was maintenance crew, off into the bowels of the water plant or repairing electricals in the reclimator or out onto the ice to replace some sensor. On my homestead I was me, lost in the daily shuffle of running the farm and continuing on my projects, imperceptibly improving my woodcraft day by day. But work calls and the ticket ain’t free.

It starts with a chime on my tab. At first, coming in seemingly at random, but as time wore on the chimes almost uniformly came perfectly in time to snap me out of some reverie after I’d lost myself in the workshop for several hours. I’d get a notice of where the problem was and the timeframe I had to complete the job. Usually, I had a matter of hours or a few days, enough time to wrap up what I was working on and make sure the farm was well-tended before I headed off.  Only a half dozen times was I given a notice that required immediate action, although whether this was to genuinely resolve some highly time-sensitive issue or simply because the ship thought I needed a jolt of adrenaline was anyone’s guess.

Grudgingly, I would tidy up the workshop, grab a bite, and then stroll off through the paddocks toward the doorway. After changing my shoes at the threshold I’d head off, trodding down the long hall. My tab would always provide a handy set of directions and show me where to go and where on the ship I was headed, but after my first couple jobs I figured out these were largely redundant. A path was always laid before me. As I walked along the endless halls the turns I needed to make and doorways I was intended to use would lay open and glow softly. If it wasn’t open, it wasn’t the way to go. Besides, I knew beyond every closed door was just hard vacuum. The ship had a route for me and prepared it for me ahead of my coming. A few times I took off at a sprint along some stretch to see if I could catch up to the ship opening doors for me. My experiment proved impossible, for all intents and purposes it was as if my determined route was always this way, warmly lit and passable. Even if I knew that wasn’t the case. No rat in a maze here, there was only one way I could go.

Typically, I’d only walk a k or so to the nearest tram depot and then be quickly whisked up ship to the electronics and comms center or downship towards the water depot and reclimator. Most jobs took the better part of the day, zipping off to replace some pump or bit of wiring before heading back for dinner. Most times, the routes were direct and jobs relatively quick, sure sometimes when the Folly thought I needed a bit of exercise -or as I’d come to believe, when it was feeling particularly sadistic- it would route me through several kilometers of hallways winding through the great pieces of industry contained in the belly of the ship leaving me to walk the way under my own power. But for the most part it was all business out in the halls of the Folly, I was a living, breathing maintenance machine and the AI just wanted me out to do the job and back home safe.

It was far from a silent place, my home amongst the stars. The gentle whoosh of air currents racing by, the flow and moan of water pipes running overhead, or some great, laborious machine pounding away at task unknown, like any great beast she made plenty of noise of here own. But that was just the start. Certainly, the designers had quickly realized that if they left these vast tracts of halls to sit in silence patrolled by lonely watchers that their crew would quickly go insane, seeing ghosts around every corner, their minds fabricating sounds and visions into the sterile silence. So, there was life! Or at least the sounds of life. Plodding down the halls unseen speakers would supply the sound of frogs after a rainfall, turn the corner and there’d be wind rushing through the leaves of an aspen tree, down the next corridor sounds of birds singing in the morning; sounds I’d never heard before and likely didn’t exist anymore on our dying planet all accompanied me on my lonely marches. 

At first, I found these soundscapes incredibly disconcerting. I wanted silence. I wanted to be able to hear if some ghoul was around the corner or coming up behind me. But after a few hundred unsure glances back over your shoulder your mind eventually has to relax, and accept that you are truly alone. Then, and only then, these sounds from home take on a whole new meaning, keeping you company on your journey, reminding you of all that we lost, all that we left behind, and all that we hope to build once more in the distant future.

And oh the music! Of course there was music. The Folly carries the summation of all human achievement, how could we leave the great arts behind? As I’d approach my destination for the day over the soundscape to which I slowly shuffled would drift the first notes of some grandiose composition long forgotten by living minds, but dutifully stowed in our data banks for posterity. Out in the vast tracts of the ship I’d take in sweeping concertos, warbling erhus, silken sitars. Folk music from a million proud lineages would drift towards me as I worked away, digging through piles of wires or heaps of sludge to replace some blown fuse or worn gasket. 

Of course, at first I’d sought to put in my requests. Combing through my tab for any sort of music interface, and then rejected, I took to yelling out at the ship to play something, anything I’d heard before. Only back on the farm when I was making myself useful in the kitchen or workshop or gardens would the ship budge in the slightest on this front. There, I could choose to have music on as I desired, but even then the ship chose the playlist, mixing in modern music I was familiar with, with an endless trove of other recent compositions I’d never heard. An utterly infuriating arrangement at first, but eventually I had to recognize good taste even if it’s coming from some pile of code. After all, it was built to provide me with what I needed to hear rather than what I wanted. Out in the vast halls of the Folly though, I was at the mercy of the AI as it determined the proper soundscape for a given room, tunnel, or gallery.

 And thus most jobs came and went, pulling me off the farm for a couple of hours before I could head back for dinner. I’d come to appreciate these forays in their own way, a quick baptism in technological sterility to break up days that were beginning to run a bit too much together in the workshop. But eventually, the bill came due, a critical repair that consumed me for weeks and will haunt me forever.

--

All debts are paid in the fullness of time.

I was sanding away in the workshop on a sunny afternoon, nearing completion on my first attempt at a set of shelves to replace the post-industrial block that came with the old place. A gentle chime pulled me out of my contemplation and asked me to respond to a call in Cryosleep Hall 362 within three hours, an ominous sign in retrospect calls almost never gave me that tight of a timeframe; I usually avoided the cryo halls after my initial curiosity had been satiated, they were too eerie, too cold. But at the time I thought nothing of it; I simply tidied the shop and set off through the paddock smiling as the chickens clucked happily when I walked by. The ship wasted no time in taking me directly to a train downship and dropped me almost exactly where I needed to end up. In all maybe half an hour had passed since I’d received the call, but when I stepped into Hall 362 it was utter bedlam.

As I rounded the last corner towards the hall waves of water several inches deep rushed up to greet me and my heart dropped. Water running amok in the ship meant the shit had seriously hit the fan. Before I could even step all the way into the hall an acrid electrical burning hit my nostrils and I could see harsh, flickering electrical arcs lighting up the first several dozen caskets. My tab chimed in a cascade of different alarms and instructions before I got any further and could hurt myself. A storage cabinet, indistinguishable from the wall beside me, slid back to reveal an emergency response suit of heavy red rubber. Our training program was intentionally brief before we departed but they were clear on one thing if you see an emergency suit put it on. Immediately.

Dropping my tab, I jumped into the cabinet out of the flooding water and wormed my way quickly inside of the suit, double-checked all the seals, and allowed it to pressurize. As the pressure equalized my ears popped and the suit came alive bringing up a series of heads up notifications that largely repeated what my tab was trying to tell me, servomotors activated in the joints to help me move more naturally, and then a calm voice came on “Thank you for using this emergency response suit, please stay calm and proceed into Hall 362 for a critical repair.” It was meant to be reassuring I’m sure, but my heart nearly stopped and I struggled to stay on my feet.

In nearly a year and a half of living ship time, I had not heard another human voice speak. Even so much as this bland approximation that inhabited the suit was an absolute shock to the system. I’d grown so used to only ever hearing my own voice- and had long since given up on hearing anyone else’s until my stint was up that to have this even-tempered voice piped into my ears left me blindsided. “Attention. Please proceed into Hall 362 for a critical repair.” After the initial shock passed I snapped into action, my scrambling guided by the flurry of information the suit presented to me.

Stepping into the hall I was honestly surprised the ship had given me such a long timeframe to respond; the coolant pump of the third row had burst with enough force to blow the top clear into the ceiling, water poured out of the pumps and residual electric charge in the pump continued in a riot of white-hot sparks. It was, by a long shot, the most apocalyptic scene I’d encountered since leaving earth. The heads-up display on my suit began to streamline alarms and information in an attempt to get me into action immediately. The ship had cut off water and electricity to the pump as soon as it burst but that didn’t help what was already in the system. Millions of liters of water and untold volts of electric charge were isolated in the pump and were finding their own way out. Meanwhile, the caskets of the 2,000 sleepers on this row began to imperceptibly warm, ushering in complications with cryo, erased memories, prolonged recovery sickness, and eventually death.

With adrenaline-fueled clarity, I grabbed my repair kit and started at the top of the list. First order of business, make this place less of an electricity risk. My suit was well equipped to absorb more voltage than was contained in the system so I wasn’t too worried about myself, but the sparking electricity meant that current was arcing between some points and with each arc came the possibility of a short in another system or damaging other lines in the pump. Right now it was clean water running out, I did not care to think about what would happen if a freon line was severed...or an oxygen line. 

I rushed into the pump fighting my way up current grabbing hold of the twisted and rent metal of the pump housing to pull myself up into the electrical storm. The pump by any standard was huge. Almost two stories tall and nearly twenty meters long they looked a bit like some overgrown electrical transformer. The explosion had torn away most of the roof and a good deal of the front panel where the access door would have been, leaving a valley of mangled pipes and torrenting water.  Even through the heavy insulation of my suit, my hair stood on end and chills ran down my spine as hauled myself up and up into a vortex of lightning.

Searing white light tore across my eyes as rattling sparks shook me to my core. Over this tumult of information, the ship dropped in even more on my display hoping to help me isolate which circuits were arcing and where I needed to make connections. Swallowing hard I tried to make peace with myself, there was nothing to be done but trust the suit. Either it would hold and I’d be able to complete the job or these two thousand sleepers and I were history. Hopefully, the suit’s makers had been a little bit more careful than those who’d made this pump. With two gloved hands I reached in with a length of repair cable aiming for what was plainly the highest voltage arc, a white-hot bolt of raw electrical power that nearly left me blind; a heart-stopping moment later, two quick clamps with the ends of my repair cable, and I had completed the circuit as unabsorbed current ran up my arms and set my whole body to shaking. It was all I could do to not be sick inside the suit.

Once the arcs were stopped and covered in a generous spray of insulating foam, I turned to the water. While no new water was coming into the system, each pump contained several thousand liters in its systems at any given time and that wasn’t to mention the near million more that would be running through the casket systems all connected to this one pump. The torrent I’d fought to get up here was probably just the beginning. Indeed, a bona fide river had begun to form across the floor of the hall where the current headed towards the doorway. Clambering back down into the belly of the pump I ducked inside and my headlamp illuminated a scene cut straight from a sailor’s nightmare. The pump, when working, was an incomprehensible riot of piping and gauges, now with a good third of its bits torn asunder, it was pandemonium. All the while more water continued to pour past me and out through the torn hole behind trying desperately to drag me back through the tangle of twisted pipes and torn metal.

My suit helpfully popped up my next task, to manually close off the valves for each cryo circuit’s water main. For redundancy, and maintenance, each circuit only served fifty caskets, and as I wormed my way through the piping and gushing water I realized what I was in for. Forty separate valves, all located around the edge of the pump, all with a closure wheel that hadn’t been operated in eons. All electrical intervention had been cut off to the pump, so the only way to mitigate the damage was to get these valves closed myself. I pulled a breaker bar out of my repair kit, once I finally managed to squirm my way to the first valve, lodged it in the wheel and heaved with everything I had. With a scream of effort and a crack the wheel turned, the first valve close and undetectably the torrent lessened. One down, thirty-nine to go.

I walked out of the pump that night sweaty, bruised, and tired to the bone. I followed the now trickling current out the door where the ship had opened up a new drain to mitigate the worst of the water damage. It was all I could do to pull the suit off and stumble a few yards down the hall to where the ship had opened up a tiny sleeping nook with a spare cot in the wall for me. What a cruel juxtaposition, a ship that could manage so many of its own runnings that could know when I was too tired to make it even to the next canteen and magically produce a bed for me. But when some machinist misses their mark on the wrong part of the millionth coolant pump they built in some incomprehensible assembly line, and it becomes life or death in a heartbeat. Collapsing into the bunk I curled up to spend my first night out truly alone, with the ship and all of her ghosts.

They would prove to be nearly sleepless nights tossing on my cot, holed up in the unfathomable belly of the ship. Not least because there was verifiable unnatural activity all around me at any given moment always hovering just out of view. This was a catastrophe for the ship, and it would sink a good portion of its self-repair resources into getting things sorted as quickly as possible. As such, every time I awoke and looked around the corner things would look a bit tidier, a bit different, the ship still wanted to keep it’s repair programs hidden even in emergency situations. No, what haunted me were the sleepers. Every second that ticked by they warmed a little bit more. Their caskets keeping cool with only passive insulation now. Every second was another memory lost, was another week in a painful recovery, was another soul who’d never come off the ice. Even if most of them were rich dickheads abandoning a planet they’d helped destroy, I couldn’t condemn them like that. So I got to work.

After that first troubled night, I awoke to the sound of music. A light concerto to match the gradually raising ambient lights. A suite of cellos attempting to drown out the echoing, deafening silence of this crypt. I peered through the doorway at a sight slightly less apocalyptic and a fair measure less life-threatening than when I’d arrived. Once I’d stopped the backflow of water the ship was able to open up an impromptu drainage system to clear the water, and gradually the remnants of the explosion began to disappear. Whether absorbed into self-repairing walls or carried off by robotic hands unseen I couldn’t say, but I was a part of this great self-healing machine and my task lay where no clever robotic hands could fit. Now that the area was relatively dry and clear I clambered into the remnants of the pump with my tab, repair kit, and whatever materials the ship had left for me that morning and resume work on the most challenging task I’d ever completed.

It began with a base level replacement of all compromised internal components. My tab provided me a list of all the damaged parts categorized by functionality and let me work out how best to work through the interminable punch list. Then it moved on to an overhaul and inspection of all adjacent components. Was it one lousy machinist’s mistake that had caused such bedlam? Were there any other similarly compromised parts in the pump? In adjacent pumps? Or was there some greater systematic failure? The ship knew exactly where the failure had originated and certainly had a record of where each part came from and intended to find out, I was just the unlucky grunt who got to help. 

It was over two weeks of mechanical bread and butter hard labor. Take it apart, replace the broken bits, check the others for damage, clean it, put it back together. It was work pulled from my young life but magnified a thousandfold. Every day I worked crammed into various corners of the pump housing, frequently drenched, regularly covered in refrigerant, and almost always at some sort of shock risk. Still, the ghosts haunted me. So I worked around the clock, kept on my feet only by the oatmeal-like slop the ship delivered to a cubby next to my cot at regular intervals and knocked out for a few hours a day by a sedative the ship pumped into my cot area when it decided I’d had enough for the day. 

It still didn’t feel nearly adequate. Each minute eating, or sleeping, or taking a dump was another fraction of a degree up in each casket. After I’d completed the replacement of the compromised internals I had expected the ship to return water and power to the pump to begin recooling the sleepers. But no, the ship in its divine province decided that inspection of all internals was required before taking care of these poor souls. Calculating the risk of a repeat failure as less acceptable than the risk associated with a continued rise in casket temperature. Easy enough for a machine built on nothing but iron utilitarian logic, I just thought of myself in one of those caskets gradually losing my memories and past with each warming degree, an uncaring god mercilessly holding back the keys to my future.

More than once I completely lost the plot. I took off in frustration cursing the ship and the engineers and Yvette-fucking-Delaney. I beat the walls until I left read streaks, begging for the ship to turn the power on and save these poor people. Twice I just took off running, unable to sit cramped in the pump any more, I bolted screaming down endless corridors only to have the ship turn my route around and pop me back, cruelly, out into the cryo hall breathless and infuriated. But mostly I worked, haunted by the vision of my face in frozen sleep beginning to bead with water, slowly losing myself with each second that ticked by. I’d never know these people, and I probably wouldn’t like them if I did, but as I worked away in the belly of that pump I was them and they were me.

When the blessed day came that the Folly deemed my repair acceptable it began to play a lilting jig I crawled out and wept kneeling on the floor as water and electricity flowed back in and the great pump slowly lumbered to life. I shed my toolkit, my tab, my shoes, my jumpsuit and walked out of that godforsaken hall not sparing a look at the little cubby where I had weathered so many sleepless nights. I trod naked through the glowing halls of the ship passing through rainforests and city streets and operas, simply following the glowing corridors trusting they’d lead me home. And when I finally stepped through that threshold out of the frigid belly of the ship battered, weary, and very nearly broken in two to feel the warm dirt between my toes and hear the crickets chirping in the twilight and wind in the sycamores. Well, it was rebirth.

--

The ego dissolves in vacuum.

I found that out my first time out on the ice. The Delaney’s Folly, like all colonial ships, was built out of the hollowed husk of an asteroid, filled with an abundance of life and technology, then shoved by fusion engines to a bit less than 250 million miles per hour out across the cosmos. At speeds like that contact with even the most infinitesimal debris would likely spell disaster for the ship; an unfathomably small risk in the inky blackness of space, but one so dire it warranted a good deal of prevention. Ice, turned out to be the answer. Ships under construction were relocated to an orbit around Jupiter where they could receive a coating of ice, distilled from Europa’s vast oceans, a few dozen meters thick. If you did the math it was a truly inconceivable amount of water, but even still it was scarcely up to the task presented. Any rouge debris that was even remotely detectable by hull sensors would need to be avoided, all this ice was just there to absorb impacts from infinitesimal particulates not even visible to the naked eye.

All of this information was not dubbed “need to know” by the Delaney training program, so the first time that my tab directed me to an airlock for a maintenance job I had no idea what I was really in for. Prior to that ping, I had no idea that watchers were ever called on to do maintenance outside the ship. Like most people I had assumed that being encased in rock was protection enough, so you can imagine my confusion when a cubby opened up next to the airlock with a sleek spacesuit equipped with crampons and an ice ax. It looked like the kit of some retro-futuristic ice climber, not the spacesuits I’d seen in the media. I imagined clinging to the side of some great ice floe out the blackness these ancient tools all that held me away from the abyss and was gripped by the abject terror of losing my grip and sliding, tumbling into the depths of space.

Of course, that wasn’t really the risk, the ship wasn’t accelerating anymore so I couldn’t fall behind it with any kind of rush. But it was spinning, and that would prove to be the trickier bit. My tab chimed and pulled up a quick safety briefing about EVAs. Turns out that the crampons and ax were really just to help hold my position at the work site if needed, and the suit was also equipped with an autonomous thruster pack that would fly me to the site then take me back to the airlock when the job was done. I probably didn’t even need to be awake for half of the process.

Excited, nervous, and not-a-little terrified I donned the suit with shaking hands and checked the seals. I can imagine that more than a few watchers had probably got to this point and lost their nerve. The fear of stepping through the airlock and into the great unknown simply too much to face. The ship would protest, probably chime you a dozen more times to complete the job, but it would eventually move on to issues you may actually help resolve. For me though, coupled with the fear of this ultimate unknown, was a profound curiosity. Nearly two years I’d spent in the belly of the Folly, all this time out amongst the stars and all I ever saw was their simulated likeness twinkling on the ceiling of the homestead. I’d never experienced weightlessness, never seen what the ship truly looked like, never really been in space.

So as I sealed on my helmet the suit pressurized itself and then hit me with a dose of an anti-nausea drug that smelled like ginger and eucalyptus. The ship was never shy about dosing you with an aerosol drug if it thought the time called for it, there was no need for consent out here and the scents were probably just a courtesy to let us know we’d just been hit...or a placebo. No doubt, this blend was some engineer’s attempt at helping first-time EVAers relax, stop using up so much oxygen, and face their task. The aromatherapy was no match for my churning stomach though. Still, I steeled myself, grabbed my ice axe and work kit and passed through the airlock. Counterintuitively, it was the floor that opened up before me when the air had been expelled from the lock and I stared down at a series of ladders that descended a tunnel through the thirty meters of rock that even in that moment I had thought was the total crust of the ship. I scampered down carefully before finding myself at another opening in the floor through the window of which I could see stars reeling by. My first real glimpse of the great beyond since I’d last peered up through the dust that choked the summer skies.

Then my world turned upside down. The suit became mostly rigid as the thruster pack came alive on autopilot, the door slid open and I slipped out reluctantly into space. A terrified newborn headed out into a cold new world. But to my amazement, once through the door, I continued down yet another tunnel, this one much shorter but made of glistening, crystalline ice. The jets fired softly behind me offsetting the artificial spun gravity and held me centered as I slowly passed, I could see the blinking of my suit lights reflected in the crystal and the vague twinkling of stars beyond. Sliding out beyond the ship entirely now, I was taken aback by the sight. Stretching off to a curving horizon in all directions was the icy hull of the C.R.S. Delaney’s Folly. Of course, I knew the ship was huge, I’d spent years exploring and still hadn’t seen the half of it. But it was one thing to know the size conceptually and another to try and take it all in in one go. From my tiny perspective, it looked every bit a great frozen moon whose curvature was only barely perceptible from my vantage. Except for a faint rippling, it looked a great black mirror, the horizon disappearing off in the distance and the ice reflecting gently back the stars that wheeled by as the ship continued its stately rotation.

My head reeled with the sight, as my stomach churned protesting this first taste of zero-g as the thrusters spun me around and the stars whirled overhead. Another dose of anti-nausea from the suit before I heaved inside my helmet and the thruster began to push me gently along the length of the hull to a sensor array embedded in the ice a few kilometers away. As we approached the site I was brought back close to the ice and was shaken by what I saw. The ice was not rippled. It was scarred.

All along the hull, the ice was pocked and divoted, evidence of near-atomic level impacts that the ship had suffered and absorbed over the eons. That seemed likely why I’d been called out on this job. The strikes must have been unfathomably rare, but given enough time each little abrasion led to a monumental pitting of our protective cocoon. I looked up and out into the galaxy wheeling overhead the great band of the milky way sliding across the sky with hypnotic rhythm and felt inconceivably vulnerable. Here we were, so proud to think that were equal to this impossible mission, that we tiny, insignificant humans could colonize this dazzle of stars. The universe had a response to that; a few molecules ejected from some solar disk, cast out into the uncaring reaches of interstellar space to await our dawdling arrival was all it took to leave us battered to push our ship to its limits and remind us who was really in charge.

As the pack sped me along my eyes continued to adjust to the engulfing blackness, the ice began to glow gently with the light of a billion stars, and looking out towards the horizon I could almost imagine the rippling expanse to be the mirrored surface of some impossible lake. The divots, I found as I made my final approach, were generally not very deep and were mirrorlike even at their deepest points. They were scattered and told the tale of an unimaginable impact. The energy from each collision must have heated the water just long enough for it to flow briefly and fill the deepest strikes and leave the surface glistening. So when I came upon the sensor array it looked happy as a clam sitting at the bottom of a cone-shaped hole keeping all the instruments well out of the way or any potential impacting debris. Tucked along the side of the ship they could safely conduct their business of scanning the universe in all its glory. I could only imagine the forward-facing sensors had a rougher go of it, surviving by luck or numbers.

Even jetting along the edge of the ice I was probably more at risk than I had been in since I’d left earth. My repair of the cryopump may have been harrowing and exhausting but I was almost certainly in no direct danger. Out here a couple of stray atoms would wipe me out of existence with literally zero notice. Still, the ship must have calculated that to be a sufficiently improbable outcome, all the same, it was a relief to nestle in with the sensor array below the level of the deepest divots. My suit loosened up as the thruster cut off and I attached a set of tethers to hold me in place over the work site then kicked the toe spikes of my crampons in for good grip. It felt less like clinging to the side of some frozen waterfall and more like hanging down in a harness clipped to the roof of some great cave, if the floor were all the eternity of existence.

All the while my eyes dilated further and further. The suit became completely supple and felt no more encumbering than a set of coveralls. I could look out at a spinning spray of stars that was first extraordinary then awe-inspiring then transcendental. The entirety of creation rolled by again and again becoming brighter and brighter until it became astonishing that anyone could have thought space to be a dark place. The universe is light. It is a sea of photons pushing back the darkness. It is the stars coming together to rebel against the cold death that awaits all things for as long as they can.

I don’t know how long I stayed there frozen in awe. I had simply stopped to be me. This whole venture may have been unbelievably foolhardy, doomed to failure in a million different ways, but none of it mattered because I was a part of this. I was a part of this, this cosmic effort against oblivion. The universe may be uncaring, it may be arbitrary, it may just all be ticking away to some immutable laws, but it is no less divine. It is divinity written with light and I am here to bear witness.

Eventually, my helmet chimed to snap me out of my reverie and gently began to throw up information on my display. Even tucked in with the array any time outside the ship was a risk, and the ship wanted me to get on with the job. Several radio antenna had been fried by radiation over the untold years, so I spent the next several hours immersed in the work leaning back against the tethers, jabbing this way and that with the ax to move to a different sensor, and falling into the steady rhythm of work only to irresistibly have my gaze pulled towards the sky and my body turn outward as if in prayer. It didn’t matter that it all whirled by with the rotation of the ship too fast to truly make much sense of anything, it was still the most intoxicating view I’d ever witnessed.

It wasn’t until some time later though, that I dissolved into the cosmos.

--

I had begun to feel myself withdrawing. 

My circles of travel becoming concentrically tighter until I barely left the workshop, a space so thoroughly tuned to the workings of my mind that it may as well have been an expansion of my own ego. A slightly larger headspace into which I could retreat. I had begun to run. Not for any fitness, but simply run out to any repair jobs that came in to cut down on the time I had to leave my well-trodden paths on the homestead. Trails deepening in the loam off the porch and into the shop. The cow protested, the garden grew into a riot, and I lost more chickens than I care to think about. Days blurred so inextricably together that all notion of planning for the future collapsed into my obsession with my work, the next project the next iteration.

Solemnly I marked off each day, but I hadn’t even hit the halfway point of my stint. My remaining days alone stretched off like halls of the ship, unbroken, diminishing into nothingness. Surely at some point the ship would give in and begin to feed me if I let the farm utterly fail; it was known to send me nutrient-packed drinks and citrus fruits if it determined I was low on some key vitamins, so it seemed reasonable that I may be laid utterly destitute but surely the Folly surely wouldn’t let me starve. Surely.

Woodworking was beyond a pastime, past a therapy, outside the soul-satisfying self-expression it once was. It was obsession. Naked and all-consuming, I couldn’t even rouse my true self to see how devoured I’d become. The ship rarely, if ever supplied me any raw materials any more despite the fact that my tab was filled with reams of designs ready for production. I’d combed through every piece of literature I was supplied on the subject a dozen times over. My first round of new furniture for the house was a distant dream; by now every piece had been built, used, scrapped and pulled apart for materials time and again. The few pieces of timber the biofactory did deliver I hoarded like precious gems jealously guarded for some worthy project. I’d moved from simple mission designs to Scandinavian sensibility to flowery Victorian pieces; finally, I’d circled into an excessive mid-century style, addicted to the challenge presented by splayed legs and impossible curves constantly seeking evermore complex joints and radical cantilevered designs.

At one point, in a fit of frustration that the ship stubbornly refused to supply me a decent piece of timber, I grabbed my biggest saw and headed towards the perimeter trees that lined the walls of the homestead. If the AI wouldn’t give me what I wanted, I’d take it for myself. I hadn’t eaten in three days and still I sized up the biggest elm on the backside of the homestead, seeing only possibility not so much as pausing to think what would happen if I actually felled this giant. In a fury I dug in my saw blade, my mind racing over the possibilities hidden within this goliath, as chips of wood flew in a frenzied cloud. Then with a gut-wrenching rip my saw blade stopped dead and a gush of water rushed forth into the grass. Dismayed I looked into my cut and saw not a tree but a metal skeleton. Like all else in this godforsaken place, it was a lie. No hope lived within this bark, only a vast metal skeleton holding up the illusion of bucolic tranquility. I fell back into the grass and screamed into the heavens. Cursing this place, this ship, all the legions of engineers, and Yvette fucking Delaney, but mostly I cursed myself. North Denver may have been crumbling into dust and dead dreams when I turned my back on it, but at least it was real. That was worth something, wasn’t it?

Above me in the pale blue sky, behind a gentle whisp of cloud, the omniscient, calculating eyes of the Delaney’s Folly looked down at this hopeless, destructive cog in its machinery and began to run it’s self-repair protocols, puzzling out the best way to repair a broken mind.

I awoke in the grass beside the elm around midnight cold, exhausted, and shattered, to a chime on my tab. Too wrecked to even delay doing this job in protest, I staggered to my feet and shuffled off towards the door. My efforts of the previous day had already healed up into a pale scar on the trunk and the crickets sang gleefully in the starlight, indifferent to my plight. The ship took me immediately to a train that whisked me off in the wrong direction, we headed upship.

Only twice in my waking years had I headed upship, because frankly there wasn’t that much forward of the homestead. Mostly command and communications equipment that needed little repair, the ship tapered to a blunt nose just fore of my living quarters. The oddity of my route barely registered in my weary mind fixated as it was on the lies of everything around me and the all-consuming loneliness that haunted my every step. However, even the most dysfunctional mind couldn’t ignore changing gravity and as we headed up the nose of the ship I began to weigh less and less until I was floating off my seat in the train.

I should have been curious, I should have been snapped awake by this otherworldly sensation, but mostly I was just annoyed that now I’d have to fight the nausea of near-zero g while completing whatever job I’d been sent off to. It had barely been fifteen minutes afield and I couldn’t wait to sink back into the sweet ignorance of the workshop. The ship hit me with another dose of anti-nausea aerosol, this time scented like fresh pine as if to drive home the core of my mental failures. I floated out onto a platform tucked into the nose of the ship, as the illuminated corridor guided me even more to the fore the wisp of rotational gravity that remained in this narrow prow of the ship let me climb the ladder towards a glowing door above. Was the ship about to send me out front to work on some fore-sensors? I instinctively recoiled in horror of clinging to the front of this great ship, no illusion of security between me and whatever drifted out of the cosmos to tear me to pieces.

But it was not an airlock, and as the door slid aside I was greeted by an altogether stranger sight than I could have imagined. Before me was a great glass dome stretching out in a crystalline sphere, beyond which was the ice obscuring the swirling stars beyond. Bewildered, I stepped onto the circular threshold and held myself cautiously not wanting to drift away from an easy handhold. But this strange orb was oddly inviting, it was pleasantly warm and when the door slid closed behind a deep silence fell over me. My tab chimed and instructed me to stow it, and my clothes, in a cubby in the threshold as the lights began to fade around me. Then two sensations hit me at once. The whole great sphere began to spin diminishing what little remaining gravity that was left in place and it edged slowly forward, meanwhile the soft glow of the stars began to clarify. The ice was melting. This whole great sphere was, in fact, an observation bubble and I was headed out into space.

In one hypnotic motion, I was cast forward with a subtle lurch from the threshold as the rest of the ice cleared away from the sphere and the slow spin of the stars ahead came to a slow halt. The orb had matched its rotation exactly opposite that of the ship allowing a static view of the cosmos. I was drifting free in the universe, naked before all of creation. The last of the light diminished and the sphere moved out front of the ship on a slender stalk leaving me with a view of naught but the great cosmos in nearly every direction. My eyes adjusted deeper and deeper into the interstellar gloom, great structures emerged from the starlight. The milky way spread in its awesome entirety before me, stellar nurseries glowing hot and immense clouds of gas creating great webs of shadows dancing in the starlight. It was altogether the most breathtaking sight that I had ever seen, and I hung motionless tears streaming down my face my senses left in utter deprivation except for my eyes, overwhelmed by more grandeur than the human mind was built to contain.

Still, my mind worked in its weary tracks. How exposed was I floating here in the cosmos, hurtling several million miles an hour? Even if the ship calculated that the chance of direct impact was sufficiently low to allow me out here, certainly the radiation was formidable. Why would the ship send me here, was I sent out to die in silent solemnity, no longer viable to the functioning of the great ship? My body began to protest as these thoughts took root, hands reaching out for anything to grab hold of. But struggle as I might, the ship had cast me here helpless, the observation sphere was large and I could be held well away from any walls with nearly imperceptible air currents, and here floating exposed to the universe and its hazards in their millions I would remain until the ship freed me. I could only pray that it was benevolent as well as all-knowing.

As I struggled in space, limbs flailing for any purchase, my breath quickened and my heart beat out of my chest as my vision narrowed before me. Panic. Then, drifting in through the warm air a scent. In my hysteria, I sucked in great gulps of the laden air, and in it was truth. It was cut wood and crushed grass, it was spring water and clean skin, it was sage after a rain and ocean spray in the morning light. It was all we had left behind, all we had destroyed, and all we sought anew out in the heavens. I gulped it in greedily, panic overriding all control.

And then, my panic disintegrated as I disintegrated. My eyes flung open to the splendor of creation before me and my sense of self melted away like a morning fog, and then there was only the universe. For weeks, years really, my mind had worked exhausted grooves in it’s thinking, just as my feet had worn deep tracks in the dirt. It was all about the next project, the next improvement, my goals, my survival, my obsession. Me. But as the last shred of my ego was consumed by the cosmos it became clear just how silly and self-important those tracks really were. A vestige of what it took for a species to survive and flourish into self-awareness, to see ourselves in the universe. But even that was wrong, we were not separate from all of this brilliance that laid before my eyes. We were the universe wrought conscious.

Just as the immutable laws of physics turned great swirls of gas into burning stars and set planets dancing in their stately processions. Just as the abiding constants of chemistry stirred the elements of those planets into self-replicating molecules. Just as natural selection irresistibly created life evermore complex. The universe executed a grand, ineffable plan, devoid of caring or consciousness until one day a spark of self-awareness took hold in some corner of the cosmos and spread like wildfire. There was no I, no we really, just this, just all of creation working relentlessly towards cognizance. No doubt as well, that these eyes filled as they were with splendor and this mind filled as it was with some well-crafted psychedelics were only a blip in this grand system. This consciousness would eventually fade, these eyes would dim, but it would matter little the stream of awareness would carry on, and grow inexorably. Soaking in all the light in the universe, stubbornly resisting the yawning dark that awaited all things. Even everything.

It may have been a minute, it may have been a year that the ship left my body drifting in space as my mind raced out to the edge of the universe. But it mattered little. I experienced all time and no time, all things and no things, everything that ever would be and nothing at all. Blissfully though, my mind slowly wound its way back, anchored for now in the grey matter in my skull. With time I became aware again of my body, breathing slowly in the warm confines of the sphere tears drenching my face. Eventually, the ship allowed me to drift slowly back into the threshold as the ice regrew and blurred the stars beyond. I had crawled into this crystalline orb shattered and exhausted, but I stepped forth reborn.

--

There is a plot behind the farmhouse, three square headstones atop three mounds covered in white poppies.

Three souls claimed by an utterly inhuman task. Every third day as the sun rises I would walk out to clear the graves of any leaf litter accumulated from the great sycamore that stands a proud vigil over them and then stand in solemn observance for a moment for my fallen compatriots. They stared down the remaining years of their time awake and alone, couldn’t face the yawning years that stretched before them and chose an early exit. I would hope against hope that I would not become the fourth.

These headstones stand has a sharp reminder of the most important question of my time aboard the Folly. The question I mulled over day after day until the stubborn refusal of an answer had me give it up as hopeless. Why just one watcher? There clearly was ample space for several of us to share on the homestead. The Folly itself certainly could be configured to accommodate hundreds of thousands of waking occupants if needed. But presented with all possible configurations of crew sizes and structures the divine powers of Delaney decided on this. Just one lonely watcher. Condemning a procession of helpless souls to interminable waking solitude. Why?

A hundred answers spring to a restless mind. Perhaps the ship is experimenting, to see what conditions a solitary human can endure and remain productive in so that when we get to colonizing we can do so as effectively as possible. Perhaps Delaney engineers in their decades of experimentation out in the asteroid belt every permutation of crew sizes and structures ultimately spelled disaster, intergroup conflicts ultimately leading to collapse. Perhaps it really was just a cynical capitalist calculation. In order to make the whole venture profitable they needed just a few maintenance crew berths to last an almost inconceivably long time. Even doubling up on the waking crew for more than the week we were allowed during changeover would slowly eat into flight times and open berths and thus profit margins. We couldn’t have that now could we.

Or perhaps, as I’d come to favor, it was simply a matter of control. To the ship’s AI waking human crew was a tool to keep itself running when self-repair protocols weren’t up to the task. The ship needs us alive and relatively healthy for repair jobs, but that’s about it. Kept alone, and sufficiently occupied with productive hobbies and the occasional psychedelic reset we were malleable. Cogs oiled to keep the machine running. But add in another watcher and we’d be a pair together, we’d become us. Two human minds bumping ideas off one another might get ideas about an AI calling all the shots, they may get destructive. As it was, my only possible connection to others was to keep myself alive and leave behind some nice furniture if I could manage it. If the homestead were any smaller, perhaps sanity would degrade too quickly. Maybe all this artificial country was just the bare minimum to maintain sanity. Perhaps three crew lost to hopelessness over the eons of our journey was actually a smashing success.

I pitied the lost watchers to be sure, but my heart truly broke for those who came after them. The Folly clearly had protocols for pulling solo crew off the ice, for nursing them back to life, for helping them survive those first helpless weeks of the farm. Protocols that could only be mechanized hell. No helpful hands to show you how to work the land, no understanding conversations to help bring back memories lost in fog, not so much as a human face to focus on as you stumbled out of a cryogenic delirium. Only a cold, distant ship ineffably ticking away in its own logic to guide you through the most hellish weeks of your life. Clearly it was survivable, but god, only just barely.

In truth, I cannot know what took these fallen watchers. Trapped in solitude on a farm built specifically to maintain its keepers in a state of rugged tranquility, yet with the pinnacle of medical technology surely hidden around every corner, it is hard for me to imagine they fell victim to anything other than suicide. Oh, sure a blood clot in space could be just as deadly as a blood clot back home, but the ship almost certainly had as much medical data about the crew as it was possible to collect. I doubt we’d be in surer hands sitting in an intensive care unit back on earth. As much as The Folly liked to act aloof and uncaring my years aboard have shown that it’s not afraid to manipulate a desired medical outcome, whether it’s staving off scurvy or snapping a depressive spiral. Surely in the case of a true emergency the ship would break character, send out a medical robot, and save a life. No, as the days passed and I cleared the graves time and again a heavy certainty settled over me that the greatest threat to we, the watchers was ourselves.

So there the headstones sit, a cautionary tale to all the crew members who would come and go of that one threat that could never be eliminated. And every third day I’d do my little bit to mourn these lost spirits, and steel myself a little bit more against the task ahead. Whatever I had to do, however I had to do it, I must not succumb to despair. Sitting in that recruiter’s office looking over dusty old Denver it all seemed almost laughably easy. Five years of farming and light repair work? The offer seemed a slice of paradise, compared to the certainty of squalor at home. What they failed to mention were the lives certainly lost in trying to find a viable crew configuration in their experimental stations; not a word was uttered about the adverse psychological effects of prolonged solitude.

And thus the years, as they always have and always will, began to pass whether or not I could see it. For years my remaining time seemed only to expand. If you’d asked me in the worst of my depressive mania I would have assuredly told you that I had more time to go than when I began. The days were growing longer I was certain, my marks ticking away the days were erased by the ship to extend my stint. To trick me into whiling my life away. After all, what was time out here? Just a suggestion really. Ship time was not earth time was not the time of wherever our destination would turn out to be. In a cruel joke, we were “helped” by relativity at our speed, the seconds counted more at one-third of light. As if some mathematical shortening of shipboard time meant anything to those who had to live it. Not that any of it mattered, when we finally settled on a new home we’d certainly just start a fresh calendar at year zero and get on with the living. Hell, the headstones didn’t even have dates on them; the stamping of time so meaningless as to only be cruel.

Still, fast or slow, time marches on, and while it may be buried in impenetrable legal text the word of Delaney Corp. was bond. A work stint would not last more than five years of ship time. All I could do was pray that when I stumbled back out of my icy stupor on the other side that it was to a new planet and not another round on the homesetad. Until that blessed day that I’d head back to sleep, my only true task was survival. Far from a given, I’d learned, in fact it was a delicate ballet.

Down one path was the depressive mania from which I’d barely been recovered. As a passion my woodworking was equal parts engaging and rewarding, but as I’d learned it could run amok and become obsessing. So too, I discovered, with the farm. Months passed where I obsessed over working the land, maximizing harvests to no discernible purpose, only to throw some ecological factors off balance and lose the next one. Even with my time in the observation sphere held its own addictive qualities. After that first shattering journey, I began to seek out time amongst isolated amongst the stars. The ship for its part always seemed happy to let me out to enjoy the view, even if I was certainly exposed. But only rarely did it deign to supplement the experience with psychedelics, as it had on that first visit, most likely when the ship thought I was sliding back into mania. Instead, my time amongst the stars became a space of silent meditation, learning to send my mind out into the cosmos through mental discipline. Still, even monkish discipline had its hooks. Hours could slip by unnoticed as I soaked in the universe, shirking repairs and work on the farm and all the little tasks that made up my life on the ship.

So a balance had to be struck. The years sliding between one obsession and another stretched and stretched the time left before me. But out of that ignorant haze, a balance began to emerge, equal parts working the farm and the shop and the ship cut with a dose of cosmic therapy. Surely this is what the ship had been aiming for all along, some sort of a healthy regimen to keep me productive in all areas. Surely this was the balance that countless hours of experimenting and designing and coding and refining by countless minds in countless places were all built to achieve. It only took me three and a half years to figure it out.

The ship gave me a gift to celebrate my graduation. My attaining even this base level of competence at living a healthy life, it felt trivial on the surface but I couldn’t have been more proud. And unexpectedly, the ship did something that was, dare I say, magnanimous. After a few months actually felt to slip by in my new balance I awoke one sunny morning, fed the chickens, rotated the paddocks, enjoyed a quick breakfast on the porch, and headed to the workshop. As I rounded the back of the house I let out a cry of delight. There leaning next to the workshop door was a stack of fresh mahogany timber. 

For years I had been trying in vain to coax wood out of the biofactory, and for years I had been stubbornly rejected. Only occasionally would I receive a usable bit of wood, and new projects almost always meant pulling apart another piece for base materials. My supply dwindling and dwindling, and scope of projects narrowed into nothingness. But this stack of fresh planks held real promise, for the first time in nearly four years I would be able to tackle projects with fresh eyes, unclouded by the need to scrape together materials. Most importantly though, it meant I could finally vanquish my nemesis, the great table.

It was probably the great dining table in the farmhouse that had subconsciously nudged me toward woodworking. While much of the furniture when I awoke was too synthetic for the old house, it was the dining table that actually drew ire from me. I still remember all those years ago sitting across it’s great white expanse from Adrian, savoring the subtle bliss of a homegrown green bean only to have this frosted glass monstrosity glare up at me. Seemingly my whole life had been stuffed with artifice, even on earth there was hardly anything that felt as authentic as this old house, but even here it was the artifice was creeping its way in however it could. The table was glaring, it was cold, it was loud, and it was fragile. Sure you could sit eight people around it-what a laugh- and the ship could probably pop a new one out with little effort, but that was about it. After I began to make my own pieces I almost never sat at it, preferring the smaller, more real, company of my own pieces wrought from warm wood. A cafe table on the porch, a coffee table in the living room. But despite the enmity I felt for the great glass horror, I never had the raw materials to do away with it. All of that changed on that sunny morning.

With this handsome stack of red mahogany, I would be able to finally do the old house justice. Above all else that I had built, this would be my legacy to those who followed me. A great table to share meals on during the changing of the watch, somewhere to sit and write on a rainy afternoon, or spread out and experiment in the kitchen. A piece to finally make this old house a home. 

To be honest I’d scarcely been so intimidated by anything in my life. There was so much potential there neatly stacked against the workshop, but I knew this was likely the last I’d see of new material. The ship knew I coveted new wood above nearly all else, so it had set to fulfill my desires. For all the technological wonders of the biofactory wood was resource-intensive and the Folly had many other needs to satisfy. So over the years it must have chipped away at my requests and delivered me this gift when I was finally fit to actually receive it. Or so I thought anyway, a ray of optimism sliced into the fog that had been my waking life just as the wood appeared, surely this was not just a coincidence.

I quickly hauled the timbers into the shop and stacked them neatly in the corner where they remained venerated and untouched for months. For years my mind had run amok with plans and designs for a grand table, and while this haul seemed plentiful I was only too keenly aware of its limits. If I stuffed a design or missed a cut, or god forbid, had to scrap a project, it would eat into my coveted supply. So for weeks on end I revisited the reams of plans that filled my tab refining, turning, and tweaking until I had a worthy design. A subtle blend of classic with the splayed legs and softened curves of midcentury design I’d become so fixated with, a style I could proudly call my own, my thousands of hours in the shop finally paying a discernible dividend. Even then I did not begin. Not until I had planned every cut, join, and plane down to the millimeter was I ready to work this red gold.

It was a crisp afternoon when I finally steeled myself to get to work with my new treasure. My plans had been drawn to the finest detail. I knew exactly which boards would be used where, how I would lay them out, what joins would go on which corners, and what troublesome spots I’d need to watch out for. I had never worked mahogany before so I’d dedicated a week of my life to studying my new medium, devouring every scrap of information the ship would feed into my tab. Still I couldn’t overcome the apprehension I felt with this new endeavour. How ridiculous, to feel so utterly cornered by a stack of hardwood. Eventually even the ship got sick of my inaction, dwindling away my available reading till only my plans remained. So I turned to my other pastimes, meditating in the observation bubble, roaming the halls of the ship, and tending the farm. Even these began to close themselves off to me, the ship only opening little circuitous paths that led straight back to the homestead, and eventually even going so far as to close off the observation dome to me. It was as outright an intervention as I’d ever seen from the ship. So I whiled my days away over tending the garden and concerning myself with all the little daily habits of the chickens, much to their protest, trying to convince myself that this was productive work. But eventually all fears must be faced, and that crisp afternoon I looked around the garden realizing that any more intervention and I’d likely jeopardize my upcoming harvests, there was not to do but take that first sickening step.

One stomach-turning leap, and then, flight.

The wood came alive in my hands as soon as I lifted it from the corner. I worked slowly, methodically, and surely. Every timber had its place, every joint slipped neatly in, every scrape of my planar hypnotically coaxed my vision forth. There was a true form in this wood, and it wanted to come out. It took me seven days to complete this magnum opus, transforming raw potential into immaculate execution, but my tools were sharp and my hands were strong and my mind was honed exquisitely to this task. One could look at all our time in the workshop working endlessly away and cynically say ‘Oh, what a nice pastime.’ and ‘Isn’t it funny how humans crave diversion.’ or ‘Odd that they would allocate so many resources to this little workshop for one person.’ But I felt none of that. The days slipped by in entrancing concentration, demanding perfection at every step; when the last coat of oil had dried and I assembled my work in the kitchen of the old farmhouse, well, it felt like mastery.

Even a robotic mind knew that the completion of a piece like this was cause for celebration. I busied myself in the soft afternoon light, gathering together my latest haul from the paddocks and garden to put together a proper feast, and the ship dug deep in its stasis cabinets to send forth some gifts from past watchers. A handsome piece of manchego, a beautifully eared loaf of sourdough that was somehow felt still warm, a few new pieces of hand-thrown tableware to replace my chipped pieces, and - this was a first- an elegant corked bottle of toasty amber ale with a note that read simply ‘Excellent work. -Sasha’. I set the table for two if only to imagine how that first meal would feel when I was finally able to pull that next watcher off the ice, when I was finally able to put an end to this loneliness. As I sat at the head the great table stretched away from me in its handsome red hue, the table settings told the tale of years of mastery, every bit of food every drop of ale held remnants of a hundred souls rent apart by time. Now sharing a meal through their work. For the first time in possibly my entire life, a new sensation crept through my body like a life-giving spring. Contentment.

That feast was some months ago now, and time, as it always does, crept slowly on. Since my first day on the homestead I had kept a solemn count of my waking time, a notebook with little neat hatch marks ticking away the days, organized to try and diminish the time ahead. For so long they had failed, for so long time only stretched out before me. But time does not care for our wants or our perceptions, it only marches on. I stumbled forth from fogs of obsession and depression and near-absolute despair disoriented and lost, but still, time had marched on. Even if I failed to see it. But after that great feast, toasting those who came before me and listening to the crickets sing in the gentle evening, an altogether strange thing happened. My time began to run short.

Objectively, of course, I completed my masterwork with a little less than a year left on my work stint. On any given day, if asked, I could have told you precisely how many days I had left to go, how many little tallies waited to be made in my notebook, even if the number held no true meaning to me. But out of all the chaos and dizzying confusion, a balance had been restored to my life and I grew into a new person, one for whom the days had real meaning once again.

After that grand feast my final golden days began to slip by ever more quickly. My remaining mahogany quickly allocated itself into some final projects, reworking into a set of stately chairs and a new rocker for the front porch. The observation bubble reopened itself to my meditations keeping my inner eye focused on the grand cause of this expedition. Even my maintenance jobs began to glow in this new rose-colored tint. The halls of the ship seemed less haunted by hidden robotics and the millions of frozen spirits, and more filled with all the splendor of human achievement. Here I was, out doing this impossible thing, becoming the new, better type of person that our new, better world would demand.

And now my tallies are full. My notebook is complete, my waking time aboard the CRS Delaney’s Folly has come mercifully, heart-wrenchingly, finally to a close. I sit on the bench of my workshop looking out past my garden exploding with life, over the rolling paddocks with the chickens pecking happily away in the morning light, out to the great trees that obscure the horizon and make this place feel endless. My final scraps of wood I have worked into a large bowl for preparing and serving, for harvesting and carrying, one last gift for those who come after me. One last bit of legacy. As I gently polish on the last coat of oil darkening the grain into a deep red, my tab chimes. It can only be one thing. Time to change the guard. It will be several days before the soul I pull off the ice will be able to sit at my table and eat their first meal in god knows how long, but I am happy to wait because it will be not me, but us. I walk through the cropped grasses and joyously step through the threshold this time undaunted by the chill of space, the corridor glows ahead leading me down through the ship to the halls of sleepers, and down in the belly of the ship one casket has begun to warm, a heart has begun to beat once more, another mind is fighting its way forth from the fog.

And finally, I am not alone.

---

Hey! I’m also publishing these stories on Medium, follow along there for updates! View on Medium.com>>