We, The Voices

Author’s note: This is the second installment in an anthology series with my previous story We, The Watchers. For now, we turn our view to a different ship in a different time in a different corner of the galaxy. If you’d prefer to read this story on Medium for different formatting you can do so here.

—

The bridge of the Delaney’s Foil was an excellent place to have a drink.

A vaulted stone ceiling rose loftily into a ribbed and gusseted dome culminating in a chandelier that cascaded in its million pieces of glass back down. Great columns rose at four corners, exquisite in their delicate inlays, not for support, of course, rather for the bedazzlement of all who beheld them. The floor stretched off in all directions, hewn from the same stone as the dizzying ceiling above but now polished smooth into a near mirror to reflect back all the light that rained down. The entrance was a flourished fan of excessive ornamentation marking with admirable definition that this was a new place, a place one wanted to be, a place one was lucky to set foot in, a place so unlike the endless cold halls of the ship beyond. Down the middle of the bridge lay a stretching expanse of redwood, a long table ready to host a board meeting of thirty even if it were exceedingly unlikely that more than seven of us would ever gather around it. Between each set of columns, little nested corners tucked away here a cafe table, beyond a pair of handsome reading chairs, across the room a small fountain bubbled away the silence of the ship.

Above the splendor loomed, of all things, a bar. A handsome expanse of black marble spread nearly the length of the bridge lined by black cushioned stools on slender gold pedestals. Beyond, rows of polished, ornate bottles marched upwards, glowing on lit steps. Around and above them an art deco showpiece reached up into the vaults of the ceiling. Fanned slabs of stone cantilevered gracefully out. Layered golden sconces glowed brilliantly. Miles of delicate gold inlay chased every angle again and again until the eye was lost in the splendor of this opulent maze. 

All of it was a monument to human ingenuity. We built a bridge like this, so glorious in it’s excess, and sent it off into the far reaches of space simply because we could. It was at once a masterpiece, the culmination of a proud history of design now perfected and sent out to the new world, and it was also the most garish facade I’d ever seen. Opulence, created to put fear of its creator into those who dared set foot upon the bridge.

As it turns out, when you’re spinning out of the long stretches of interstellar space the one thing you have in abundance is time. It took our faithful ship years to reach cruising speed and years to come back down again as we approached our destination. So while you may naturally have pictured the bridge of this great vessel like something out of an old-timey naval movie- sailors arrayed around a captain, a score of instruments pinging away, maybe a big helm for sudden evasive maneuvers- you know, a place for action. It’d probably be best if we dispense with those notions now. No, coming out of that blackness time is in abundance and consensus is what the bridge is built for.

As you may imagine the Foil was packed full of just about every technological marvel that the collective minds of Earth had been able to conceive over the past several thousand years. Including a formidable AI system, that would almost certainly horrify us if we truly understood the true breadth of its intelligence, with a directive to run the ship and navigate it to wherever we on the jury decided to point it.

So that’s what the bridge was built to accommodate, a select jury of seven, deliberating until the very future of humanity had been decided. Every bit of knowledge housed deep in the ship’s library was available at a moment’s notice, all distilled by the AI to provide exactly the information we needed right when we needed it. It just so happened that when an AI needs to get a bunch of humans to agree to a course of action before it can begin to move down its next cascade of objectives, that the best place to accomplish such unanimity was a bar. Hence, the bridge of this proud ship was made to entice one to sit and have a drink, strike up a conversation, to consider things from a new perspective. Very few problems were so intractable that sufficient time and lightly lubricated conversations couldn’t put them to rights. And the opulence? Well, you had to cater to your clientele.

Even the exuberantly pure priest amongst our ranks Joshua, his eyes glinting with vigor and a faith that was all but gone from our world, found the bridge’s atmosphere intoxicating. Even if he refrained from the top-shelf sauce the rest of us made free with. That was fine. He could get high on God, I contented myself with the finest single malt millennia of human ingenuity could create.

Yes, as the lot of us stood scattered around the bridge the evening before we began our deliberations something like congeniality had staggered forth from the cryogenic abyss with us. The worst of the waking sickness had passed, we hoped, and a steady diet of increasingly solid food combined with a half dozen cocktails a day had everyone beginning to feel like their old selves again. We seven had done this impossible thing, crossed the void and lived to tell the tale. Of course, we’d all been briefed on the other jurors years before we left earth, several of us even had notable histories together. The jury that would shape the fate of humanity. I myself had been taken off every aquatic management project I’d been overseeing for the family a full three years before I went on the ice, my fate decided by the powers that be to cast my lot in with the Delaney’s Foil, to preserve a new place for Saito International amongst the stars.

No jury of peers here. The seats at this bar were bought with coin or knowledge or blood. For myself, Saito International had traded nearly all of its holdings on Europa. A dear trade beyond a doubt, but one deemed worth the investment. The House of Saito rose to prominence in the wake of the collapse of East Tokyo, deploying groundbreaking water treatment tech to a dying city and saving millions in the process. From there it could only be onwards and upwards for a growing conglomerate as humanity took to the stars. First, it was treatment. Then desalination. Then harvesting. Before too long 95% of the freshwater in the system was Saito property, and even that was not enough to stop the juggernaut that was the Delaney Corporation as it set its sights for interstellar space. So eventually, Saito came to the table and began to sell off holdings in exchange for control as humanity began its great diaspora. Water was an invaluable resource on earth, and nearly as much so out in the system, but not as invaluable as immortality. Joining Delaney’s great venture was really the only option for a family seeking eternity. Out amongst the stars, we hangers-on of the great houses could be put to good use, before we got any smart ideas about our cousin’s holdings. Out here those of us condemned to non-voting board seats had a chance to turn the tables. On our fates. On our families. On the Delaney Corporation itself.

So for three years, I prepared. Studying the routes we would likely take. What the statistical probability of habitable planets was in those systems. What those planets might look like. What Saito patents may prove useful there, and how I could gain some leverage on this new planet. But more importantly, I studied these people, this jury. Who they were. Where they came from. What they might be looking for out here amongst the blackness of space.

We had Joshua, the Jesuit, berth purchased with the final breaths of a dying church hoping to find new life in a new world. Marquez the biologist, who’d been friendly enough when she pulled me off the ice, but who I knew had crawled over a pile of blackmailed scholars for her place here. Marchand, the astrophysicist who’s rich, dark face had seemed so enchanting when we met as she received her second Nobel Prize. But who now seemed gaunt, drawn, and greyed. God knows how long she’d been awake; as she sat at the bar that first evening attempting some amiable chat she struck me as a junkie gritting her teeth between hits. 

The bulk of my studies had focused, naturally, on Hector Yun the scion of Yun Aeronautics.  Their deal had been similarly Faustian to my own, air purification and generation tech plus massive holdings on Venus had bought seats on nearly all Delaney juries, giving the Yun legacy an almost certain shot at immortality. In a way, I actually felt rather lucky to have been matched up with Hector. His family’s technology, and control thereof, was formidable. He had proven himself a capable manager of family affairs with the central Chinese purification systems, and had even come out looking quite distinguished when he was called on to sort out a crisis with the colony air generation on Venus. His bright eyes and quick smile made him easy to like, even if I knew that under all the gloss and backslapping was a mind steadily calculating it’s next move. But for all, that he was rather slow, at least when compared with his siblings, and there were smarter Yuns on other ships. In a world where all the progeny of the world’s great corporations are destined from birth for a world of competition, thinking of the next move was not nearly enough. No, where we came from it was necessary to think miles down the line, minds constantly running and updating a dozen different likely outcomes, subtly shifting inputs to relentlessly increase family stock prices. Besides, we had a fair share of history ourselves, and never before had he found the better of me at a negotiation table. No, Hector Yun did not worry me, my worry laid with Liam Delaney.

The captain of this happy ship, if there could be said to be one, was Liam Delaney. First off the ice upon approach to a new planet. First to learn of what lay ahead. The one to call a jury to decide our fate. In the end, we needed consensus to begin a new colony. But Liam had the opportunity to assess a new system, decide who to pull out of cryo and in what order, and to act as foreman to our meetings. His last name didn’t hurt his case either. Having the ship named for your family certainly makes you seem like the captain, even if you don’t get the title.

A late-born nephew to familial matriarch Yvette Delaney when she began her conquest of the stars, Liam’s branch on the family tree was particularly ripe for pruning when the time came to fill the ships. You see, young Liam didn’t have the good sense to feign mediocrity and enjoy all the benefits his name could supply. No, he had to set forth like his great, great grandfather and become an axiomatic businessman. The family poured education and privilege and cognitive gene editing equally among all their young sproutlings to see where the Delaney seed would flourish, but by the time young Liam had began to show his promise the lines of inheritance had been all but set, even if it pained Yvette to watch young talent go to waste. So he was relegated to the management of the family’s asteroidal holdings. A task he took up with some vigor and quickly consolidated a nearly inescapable hold over the entire belt. From there, it was merely a hop and a skip for him to begin collecting control intra-Jupiter commerce and before too long Liam had built an empire even his proud ancestor Josiah Delaney would be proud of.

Surely at that point, Liam was reconsidering his position in the line of succession, and surely Yvette was not blind to the young man’s ambitions. So his branch, laden with promise, was summarily snipped from the Delaney tree and packaged up for transplant to a new world. His consent in the matter wouldn’t have even been a consideration.

So this was the adversary I had been set against. An undauntable force whose family had near monolithic control of our home system. As he strode across the bar, a grim set to his chin, he looked every bit the progeny of his heralded ancestor. Unlike most of his family whose Latino descent showed prominently, Liam carried a shock of red hair above his crystalline eyes and powerful shoulders, one more way to honor his forbearer. He was a considerable man by any measure. Standing a full head over me when I had chance to meet him on Earth, he was certainly a man of imposing physicality. As I studied him from afar,though, here aboard the Foil he seemed different somehow. Diminished. Left on his own, his face would set into stoic contemplation, eyes drifting off to ponder some unknown turmoil. His face was a mask that day as he cajoled around the bridge a pint of dark ale in hand, a smile rode on his face when he greeted each new juror personally. Measuring, testing, befriending, entrancing the others.  Somehow, someway on this new world, I had to best this man. I had to find a way to parlay this bet my family had made on me into posterity in the new world.

As I looked across the bridge on the first day of our deliberations I saw people I knew, some only from afar, others more personally. I saw ambitions I could use. I saw fears I could exploit. And I knew they all saw the same thing. No doubt we’d each been meticulously prepared for our time on this jury. Our time shaping humanity’s future. Each member with their own distinct and often mutually exclusive desired outcomes, and yet each entirely codependent on the others for consensus. Ambition clashing with ambition. And so we sat and talked and drank. Each of us trying desperately to rid ourselves of the dregs of cryosickness with a stiff drink, and against all odds an air of camaraderie settled over the bridge. We were those tasked with deciding humanity's future, we had crossed the stars, we had carried the human spark out to a new world. Each of us was known, each of us seen, each of us a potential ally or hindrance or casualty of our own machinations.

All except one.  The final member of our jury, Lorena. The one true unknown amongst us, who’s seat at the bar had not been bought. She sat lightly atop a padded stool the first night of our deliberations leaning on the dark marble bar top sipping lightly at a bubbling flute of champagne, chatting animatedly with Marquez. Her long grey hair was tied back simply, her navy jacket refined and plain, her dark skin smooth not yet gone to mottle, her bright eyes dancing in the chandelier light.

Against all the might of the great corporation, the remnants of old Earth’s governments could not bring much to bear. Too much power had been accumulated across too great an area. No code of laws could withstand a corporation soaked in riches from a hundred worlds. But as the eyes of humanity turned outwards the remaining governments knew they had to make a play for the good of those they still represented. Or at least that’s how they thought of it. And so rather than hold their citizens at home, to try and save a dying world, they stepped boldly forth with the Delaney Corporation offering the citizenry itself to the project. In exchange, all they sought was a seat at the table. Not for any government head or diplomat, but for a passenger, selected at random from the holds and called upon to help make this most incomparable of decisions. A Voice for the People.

I knew there would be one of her like amongst us. I knew that no matter how much I’d studied the others that this damnable democratic delegate would always be my biggest unknown. I wanted to despise her. She who thought to sit amongst these proud families for the price of an economy ticket. She who, known to her or not, presumed to speak for the millions still frozen in the holds of the ship. But as she sat at the bar that night, eyes laughing, slim profile humble in the midst of so much garishness, it was hard not to be enthralled.

We sat on that first evening, chatting pleasantly, idly fishing for any munitions that may have been missed in our respective briefings. To one side of the room, the bar rose in its glittering ostentation, the chandelier torrented down from the ceiling in its millions of shards, the great table stretched off in either direction making a mockery of wood scarcity back on earth. But none of this grandeur held our gaze that night. Opposite the bar, nestled between two soaring columns was the ship’s primary display. It could show anything in the library. Data analyses, live external feeds, great works of art. Usually, the ship’s AI would fill this imposing canvas with some timeless masterpiece that it deemed appropriate for the conversation at hand, although for an AI it sure seemed to have a weakness for renaissance landscapes. But that is not what hung above us that night. No. Glowing blue and green upon an inky backdrop, swirled in great whisps of cloud, looking achingly like home, hung a planet. Hung a miracle.

--

Fansa122b was an inadequate name for a miracle, but I guess that’s what you get when you leave the naming up to an AI.

Poor name or no it hung gloriously over the bridge that evening, laying bare the shallowness of our ostentatious aesthetic. The universe was an artist. Creating wonders that outshone our little rectilinear obsessions a million to one. The planet beamed back at us in a shroud of white cloud stretching in elegant arcs away from the equator, dancing to and fro to reveal wide expanses of pure blue seas. Dotted here and there among all this unsullied ocean lay great swathes of teal green ranging from an electric seafoam to brooding turquoise to deepening purple. It was enough to take your breath away. But then the clouds would continue their chaotic dance revealing some new unprecedented wonder of this aquatic world, and then, on occasion a new color. Land. Rising red and ragged from the depths great archipelagos rose from the frothing seas spraying out in brilliant island chains that climbed the latitudes.

We all sat in contemplation, thinking the same thought. “My god, it looks just like home.” But no home as we’d known it. No denuded forests. No oceans filling with the toxic sludge of exhausted topsoil. No great industries steadily particulating the atmosphere, slowly erasing the stars from human memory. No, this planet was precisely what we sought as we left home behind, a gift from the universe. Another chance at life, if we were so worthy.

By all accounts, the planet was actually a statistical miracle. Up until a couple of light-years out from the system, the Foil would’ve only had a hunch that planets orbited in the habitable zone of this cool, diminutive star. As we approached, the ship began to pick out more and more details of the system. Planet size. Orbital periods. Average surface temperature. Eventually, enough selection criteria were met for potential colony planets and the ship deployed a swarm of array telescopes to fan out and begin direct-imaging the system in steadily increasing detail. Quickly, the AI eliminated several likely candidates in the Fansa system, one tidally locked to the sun, one smothering beneath a crushing atmosphere. But one that showed promise. One with geological activity. One with an active magnetosphere shielding off the worst of what space had to throw its way. One with a workable 1.43g surface gravity. One with a healthy atmosphere providing not just a livable surface pressure but a downright balmy average temperature of 18 degrees centigrade. All of these were miracles in their own right, any of which would have made a strong case for a new colony. But none of them were the miracle.

No, Liam Delaney had the honor of discovering the miracle of Fansa122b. Around the same time as the telescope array was deployed Liam was taken off the ice and briefed with all available observations to decide if a jury should be called. The ship proudly showed him all of its orderly data, highlighting areas of interest and facets that suggested colony candidacy. But for all of its measurements and insights, the Foil’s AI was only capable of revealing mysteries, not miracles. It could detect some oddities in the atmospheric composition. Too much free oxygen. A surface temp a fair shake higher than may have been expected for a planet orbiting this star at this distance. A puzzling amount of gaseous chlorine. All mysteries for further observation to be sure, but it took the eyes of Liam Delaney to behold the miracle. One look was all he needed and it was clear as day. The miracle, was life.

The sweeping intricate teal masses trailing off craggy islands. The subtle glow of bioluminescence shining back against the dark as the planet slowly turned into night. This planet was positively glowing in life, radiating back against the blackness. It looked alien and exotic and new and exciting, but it also looked more like home than anything we had any right to expect out here. This heart-aching image spun elegantly above us gradually coming into clearer and clearer view leaving each and every one of us awestruck.

“Shall we begin?” Delaney’s voice filled the room, cutting through our mesmerized murmurs and the grandiose cello quartet that the ship had chosen to befit this solemn occasion. One by one we snapped to attention. He sat slowly down at the head of the great table as the others made their way across the polished floor. I set my glass upon the bar and a server arm quickly refreshed my whiskey before I moseyed over to a seat at the end of the group. Much needed armor for the hours of deliberations that lay ahead.

“Let’s start with an overview of what we’ll be considering over the coming days.” Delaney began, clear blue eyes slowly moving from face to face to face, sizing up the rest of the jury. “You all have the briefing materials with constantly updating observations as we make our approach, but let’s cover the key information again. Fansa122b is a remarkably Earth-like planet, providing similar gravity, pressure, radiation protection, and surface temperatures to home, albeit around a smaller, cooler star. Rotational period is 1.36 earth days, while the orbit takes 147.3 days, so it would allow us to maintain fairly standard circadian rhythms after an initial adjustment period, although the axial spin is pretty much bang on 90 degrees from the ecliptic so seasonal changes would be almost nonexistent. The planet has two moons which are pretty clearly large captured asteroids, both have enough gravity to be round although together they only make up about a third of the mass of Earth’s moon, so tidal effects are likely fairly subdued. Not to mention that they would appear quite small in the night sky.” He paused, surveying his audience to see who diving right into specifics bored, Father Joshua had never taken rapt eyes off of the planet spinning on the display. While I met Delaney’s steely, appraising gaze with a slight smile and took a sip of whiskey.

“Speaking of the system, I’m sure Dr. Marchand will have a great deal more with which to illuminate our understanding in the coming days, but suffice to say for now a smaller star means a smaller system. Not only is the habitable zone much closer to the star, but it contains only five planets. Three rocky inner worlds, of which our subject is the largest and middle orbiting, and two Jovians both between the size of Saturn and Neptune although one does seem to want to give Saturn a run for its money with the rings.” The display switched on cue illuminating a deep cerulean gas giant surrounded by a splendor of silver rings. “The system overall has a fair amount of asteroid and comet mass, but in total we estimate its size at about a third of the Earth system. However, what it lacks in size it makes up for in value, early analysis shows an abundance of water, noble gasses, and heavy metals. There’s plenty to make up for what little we lost on our way here, should we decide to continue our journey.”

“Hah. Bloody likely.” guffawed Hector Yun, ambition besting his years in British finishing schools.

“Hector, please.” Delaney snapped, shooting a cold glance that stifled any other outbursts that may have wanted to follow this outlandish suggestion. “We are here to consider all the facts in our decision, and I’d urge you all to refrain from jumping to any conclusions.”

“Back to our subject.” He continued. “The planet has a mass and radius a bit larger than Earth’s, so surface gravity is 1.43g; we’d have to make some serious adaptations to our lives to accommodate this difference.” 

Gasps rang out down the table. Not at this factoid that all of us already knew, but at the fact that suddenly we were all growing heavier. “The ship’s AI is helping illuminate this point for me, upping our rotation to bring us up to 1.43g” A bright 1.08g appeared on the display and crawled up to 1.09 then 1.1, and up and up. The effects of even this slight change in local gravity were profound. Limbs dragged down. Heads lolled. The jury erupted in protests of unease. We made it all the way to 1.19g before Liam called off his little demonstration, easing us back down to normal gravity. 

“As you can see this is no mean thing, living at 1.43 would be a challenge, but one I believe we are equal to. We can use the Foil as a staging area, waking up newcomers in the interior and gradually training them up to higher gravities before sending them down to the surface.” He paused, letting this information settle in. Most of the jurors had simply read this stat and thought close enough then didn’t think twice about the implications. Medicine would need to be redeveloped. Any falling injuries would be brutal. Even the added weight of water in all of Saito’s machines would wreak havoc. If this devious of a devil laid in this glaring a detail, what other hazards lay at our doorstep? I had to chuckle to myself. If young Liam wanted us off balance he was doing a remarkable job.

“On the bright side, the atmosphere does us a bit of a favor. There’s just less of it than there was on Earth so surface pressure is roughly similar to that of standing a hundred meters or so below sea-level, very survivable without a suit. In fact, as best we can reckon if you were standing on one of the islands near the equator right now, you’d experience a pleasant 23 degrees with clear blue skies and slight westerly trade wind. Not bad for a Monday afternoon.’

“It’s not all good news though. While the atmosphere is favorable and relatively oxygen-rich, early spectroscopy shows, as I’m sure you’ve all seen, a worryingly high concentration of chlorine gas. Not enough to trouble the skin terribly, but certainly enough to require masks and filtration if not supplemental oxygen. Unless, of course, we decide to pursue some sort of terraforming strategy.” He paused and took a draught of his dark, heady ale. I swept my eyes across the room and saw visible excitement building behind several sets of eyes. “On the subject of composition, from what we can tell so far. The planet is clearly covered in a large liquid ocean that seems to be mostly pure water, it averages about four and a half Ks deep, so slightly deeper than Earths, and covers more of the surface, about 85%. Between the strong magnetosphere and the land that we can see, which appears to be mostly volcanic in formation, we can deduce that the planet is still tectonically—”

“Dios mio! Enough with the fucking analysis already Delaney!” Marquez erupted no longer able to contain her excitement, which I suppose was fitting given her role as our resident biologist. “We’ve read the materials, but none of it can tell you what one look can. There’s life!” She stood gesturing wildly to the screen which displayed a green shrouded archipelago slowly turning into night, a string of bioluminescence flickered to glow brilliantly back against the night. 

“God knows how far we’ve come on this fool’s errand and this is what we find? We’re home Delaney. It’s an honest-to-God miracle. Padre, if you were looking for the divine out here you’ve damn-well found it.” The priest having finally turned his attention to the table nodded in solemn confirmation, even if he found the delivery of this revelation a bit unsavory. “For millennia we brainlessly sabotage our home until it was nothing more than a stripped husk, and when we finally get our act together to find a new home this is what the universe delivers? A planet all but tailor-made for us. It’s beyond luck, it’s fucking divine intervention.”

Delaney raised a large calloused hand to the biologist to quiet this interruption. 

“Dr. Marquez, you will have plenty of opportunity to make your best case for our decision regarding Fansa122b in due time. For now, I ask that we only consider what we know. Many of us, myself included, look at this world and see a place that looks a lot like a home we never knew. But for now, all we know is that this planet is warm and protected like our former home. It has oceans, and land, and some formation that ranges from teal to dark green surrounding many of the islands. The unbalance of chlorine in the atmosphere is indeed puzzling but not necessarily the effect of some not-yet-understood biological process. While we Earthlings may look at these things and think that we’ve found our first evidence of extraterrestrial life, for now, we must entertain the notion that there are other explanations for these phenomena. Dr. Marchand, I’m sure you’d agree from a scientific perspective that there are other viable explanations.”

Marchand inclined her gaunt face in agreement. 

“It’s important to remember that we still have very little data about the planet and system as a whole,” she whispered, each word falling like rustling paper across the table. “The green formations could be the result of some oxidizing compound as it comes into contact with the seawater. As for the chlorine, it’s harder to explain but we could certainly imagine—”

“Cabrona! It’s fucking glowing!” Marquez interjected, sending the astrophysicist back into weary silence. “We can sit here all night and play devil’s advocate, but if that isn’t bioluminescence strung around those islands I will eat my left sock.” The table burst forth in a cacophony of agreement, all living eyes sure in their clarity that they’d spotted more life.

What a laugh, I thought to myself as I took the distraction for an excuse to slide back to the bar and freshen my whiskey. What was Delaney playing at? Marquez was right of course, the planet was a godsend. Or at the very least a stroke of luck so fine, it would be positively criminal to not act on it. Did he really think that given all of this information that we would reach consensus and the answer would be no? That this miracle of a planet wasn’t good enough? I for one would surely never be convinced. This was an aquatic world. My family legacy was aquatic. Our collective patents, desalination machinery, sea walls, and hydroelectric would all come to bear on this new world. The cards were falling quite nicely indeed. Saito-le, Saito’s house, now that was a more fitting name for a planet of this stature.

But surely that wasn’t the plan ticking away behind Liam’s eyes. This was a miracle for all of us, and my ambitions wouldn’t go uncontested. No, Delaney had been awake longer than any of us by who knows how long, plotting his vision for the future of this new world. So what was the game? Was he hoping that unbalance and discord would throw Yun and me into such a tailspin that we’d fold completely into Delaney dominance? Or was he so much holier-than-thou as to seriously believe that his role as foreman required such neutrality that we may actually be allowed to walk away from such a golden opportunity?

My whiskey was properly freshened as the tumult died down. 

“Please rejoin us Saito San, we have much to discuss.” Liam began again, shooting a final warning glance at Marquez finally ending her animated aside with Lorena. “You all are clearly well briefed, and no doubt we will learn a great deal in the coming days as our observations continue to improve, but here is one piece of information that has not been shared with you that may be vital to your decision.” He paused taking a deep breath, steeling himself. 

“As of today, the CRS Delaney’s Foil has been enroute to the Fansa122 system for 1,342 years 322 days.” The silence that followed echoed in its hollowness up into the vaulted arches of the bridge, each of us recoiled in revulsion as this truly inhuman piece of information worked its way along our synapses. “As of right now we have gone through all of our maintenance crew and waking option berths. The waking crew that’s on the farmland now is facing their second work stint. Poor souls. Clearly, this is much longer than you may have expected.”

This time it was Hector Yun who could not contain his reaction. 

“Clearly? Clearly! Clearly, we’re owed an explanation, Delaney!” The priest lowered his head in fervent prayer, Marquez was struck in silent tears, Yun continued. “Clearly, we’ve been lied to! Our target system was 324 years of flight time away. What the hell happened?!”

Liam replied in steely resolve, “Reality happened Hector.” Blue daggers coming from his eyes forcing the young scion back into his seat. “I awoke at our first target system, and it was clear as day, there was no home for us there. The terrestrial planets were respectively a ball of magma, a suffocating hothouse and a planet so geologically dead that we’d be more exposed there than here on the ship.” He took another draught of his beer, now visibly struggling with what he’d done. “So the protocols were clear, and still I made a terrible choice, with no viable colony planets given existing technology the mission continued. That is my duty and my burden as foreman of this jury.’

“Still, the price is incalculable,” he went on. “I’ve been woken five times since we left Earth. Each time I was faced with an impossible decision, each time racked with the cryosickness that you’ve all just become acquainted with. Each time, sure I wouldn’t wake to see the next system. Each waking cycle taking a little bit more of me.” Another draught, his voice was audibly shaking. “I’ve seen snowball worlds, and worlds covered in seas of hydrocarbons. I’ve seen worlds that look so promisingly like home only to learn that they’re covered in a layer of lethal gas that would make any attempt at colonization futile. Each time I spent years awake on approach considering every factor, each time electing to let you sleep until we found a place that we could truly call home...” He trailed off, eyes drifting up to the bands of cloud that strung across the northern latitudes of this new world.

“But what right did you have, Mr. Delaney?” Father Joshua’s soft voice came in, shattering the stillness that had filled the bridge. “What right did you have! WE, are the jury who decides the fate of this mission, not only you. It was our right to consider these planets, and find a new home, our right to behold God’s work.”

“Father, please. You know well that was never the agreement.” Delaney replied after a deep breath. “My duty. My burden. Is to be the first woken. To compile the observations and wait through the years as the picture becomes clearer to decide whether to call the jury.’

“For you all it was a night, and a bad hangover. For me, eight years. Eight years coming out of interstellar space, only to face heartbreak every time. So do not lecture me, I know the price we paid to get here.”

Murmurs of disquiet still rolled along the table, each of us trying to reconcile this piece of information whose dissonance threatened to shred our already tattered minds. Each of us wanting to protest the liberty Delaney took with our lives. Each of us too cowed by the force and pain he held behind his pale eyes.

It was Lorena’s dancing voice who finally broke the deepening silence. “We all died as soon as we set foot on the ship,” her musical diction somehow adding optimism to this leaden notion. “It doesn’t matter if it was three hundred years or three thousand, this was the deal we made. As soon as we set off none of us were ever going to see Earth again. So what does it matter that those you left behind are now several dozen generations dead? We did not set out to knit together an empire. We set out to find a new home for our people.” She trailed off forcing each of us to buck up to the deal we’d made.

“And now, God willing, we have found it.” The priest replied after a time, Lorena held his gaze with deep green eyes but held her silence, her champagne bubbled away untouched.

With a ponderous sigh and a final sip of his ale, Liam Delaney resumed his role as foreman. “You all will have many questions; over the coming days, and with improving observations as we continue our approach, I hope to answer them all. But the one this jury is called to answer collectively is this: Will Fansa122b become humanity’s new home?” His eyes panned around the table. “Per the charter of our mission, we must unanimously decide and may deliberate for as long as necessary. At present, our telescopic array will pass the planet in five days, providing the best picture we’ll get before arrival, and we are on course to enter orbit around the planet in eight months, seventeen days, and five hours, so we have plenty of time to decide.’ 

“No decisions will be made tonight, and you will all have your chance to make your best-case argument in favor of leaving or staying.” He looked around the table hopefully. “But before we adjourn tonight I’d like to go around the table and hear where everyone sits on the decision given present information. I, for one, am in favor of staying. This trip has taken millennia and human lives in a very real sense, cryogenic casket failures will always be a hazard and I believe it is our duty to awake the people to a new home with this much promise. Mr. Yun?”

Yun scoffed and drained the last of his cocktail. “No point beating around the bush is there?” His hungry eyes scanning the table expectantly for support. “This planet was made for us! Between the technologies of Yun, Saito, and Delaney we are uniquely provisioned to make a new home of this planet.” He beamed proudly. “My answer is stay, how could it be any different?”

“Quedate un ratito Hector!” Marquez barked in response, rising quickly in her fervor. “I agree with you all in that we should stay. But let’s not forget the elephant in the room, this planet is alive!” Yun nodded slightly in agreement, eyes still wolfish in their ambition. “I cannot wait to step down into those seas and see what other ways life has flourished in this universe, but we cannot go down there with some macho terraform-first-ask-questions later attitude. We will have to accommodate a hell of a lot to this planet, we all learned that lesson already with Liam’s little gravity demonstration.” She paused for a drink and to try and master the flush of passion that had overcome her fine features.

“We will have a dual duty on this planet. We will need to look after our people, to create a home where we can live, really live. But we will also need to protect what we find. We cannot let this place, this Eden, become another denuded Earth.” Emotions now contained, her voice sunk into a rich whisper. “It was wrong at home, and it would be doubly wrong here with new life hanging in the balance. All the same, I say we stay.”

“It is not for us to consider how we will colonize in this jury, merely if we will.” Delaney reminded, his cool tones resuming control of the room. “We have enough information to understand the basic challenges, and key ethical considerations, but we will decide how to live here as a larger society only if we stay. Dr. Marchand, you’ve been awake nearly as long as me, what do you think?”

The lean, dark astrophysicist took a deep breath and a sip from her glass. She and the priest had looked at the splendor of the bar and chosen water, although from the pained look that always rested heavily on her face I suspected some darker demon, rather than faith, fueled her chemical sobriety.

Her thin voice began. “Since I’ve come out of cryogenic stasis I have been able to make an unprecedented number of discoveries.” Her dark eyes drifted upwards as the display shifted to show the system’s position among local stars. Earth wasn’t even in the frame of reference. “The telescopic powers of the ship are of course formidable, and we have had the dark clarity of interstellar space to aid observations. Although it is also helpful that this star is generally small and dim.” Somehow I got the feeling that she’d prefer it if the star was entirely dark. 

“We are considerably closer to the galactic center now and regional space is filled with objects ripe for extensive study that will undoubtedly illuminate our very understanding of the universe. I, myself, have spent most of my waking hours on approach working on observations that will no doubt shatter much of what we thought we knew about pulsars once it is reviewed and added to our academic understanding. This is just the tip of the iceberg. This system is well positioned for studies on neutron stars, several smaller black holes, and of course the galactic center itself.” Her weary eyes, still drawn upward by the images on the display of telescopic images, began to fill with tears. 

So that’s what it was. The Marchand I remembered from Earth was always a bit soft-spoken and aloof, but this woman was an addict. She now had access to things astrophysicists could only dream of back on earth. And this new knowledge was tearing her apart.

Her softly French-accented voice continued after a moment. “As far as the system itself. Not only is the planet quite promising, but it is a favorable place to colonize from an astrophysical perspective. This star is still quite young, especially for its type, and planetary orbits seem to be remarkably stable. Plus the system is quite tidy in terms of asteroidal clutter, chances of problematic impacts are quite low. So, barring any complications on the surface, this is a uniquely safe and advantageous place for us to colonize.” A final sip from her crystalline glass. “Stay. For knowledge, longevity, and humanity.”

“And you, father?” Delaney prompted after a moment.

The priest whose eyes had once again been glued to the image of the planet spinning on the display seemed to settle lightly back into reality. “It was a shame to not get to witness God’s creations in the systems we’ve passed, but he has a plan and we are set firmly upon it. His hand has guided us through the stars to another of his creations.” 

He spoke with a conviction and reverence that made you wonder how his church had fallen so far. Maybe if they’d had more men like him, equally ambitious, smart, and faithful they could have held their place on Earth. Instead, scandal and scientific rationality had stripped away believers in their millions. Now Father Joshua, like all of us, was out here looking for a second chance. For him and for his church.

“It is our duty to make a new home on this planet. To behold all the glory of God’s creation, and bear witness to whatever other children he has brought forth from the void. Stay, I say!” He crossed himself quickly and lowered his head in prayer.

“Very well.” Delaney said with a steadying breath. “And you Saito San? Where do you stand on the issue?”

“Well respectfully Father, I have to disagree with your assessment of the cause, but cannot deny the miracle before us,” I said draining my whiskey, leaving the cube spinning in the bottom of my heavy glass. “As you point out Liam this trip, no matter the time, exacts a heavy toll both mentally and in real terms of human life. We’ve had what? A .025% casket failure rate? That’s still hundreds lost.” I looked deep into his clear eyes, gauging his reaction. There was pain, and solmen acceptance, but something else I couldn’t quite place yet.

“Hector. Our families have been in competition since long before we were alive, and that spirit has borne some of humanity’s greatest achievements. So I share your ambition in creating a bountiful new home for our kind although I hope Dr. Marquez’s oppositional influence will help us strike a middle path.” Yun looked back at me with a sardonic smile. Like me, he was born to this game, and relished his opponent’s opening move. Even if I was already working steps ahead, beginning to find unsure footing under Delaney. Marquez simply glared back, knowing that I was up to something but unable to divine exactly what.

“And Dr. Marchand, that’s very nice to hear about the observational potential, but mostly I’m just relieved that we won’t have to fend away too many cataclysmic asteroids. Although I’m sure some Delaney tech could help us out there if we were in a pinch.” Liam stared in silence, sensing trickery but too prosaic to imagine what my performance hoped to accomplish. “I, and the house of Saito, will be very pleased to bring our resources to the use of this new colony and help us make a new home on this world. I say we shall stay.” I ended with a slight bow and a fittingly modest tone. Best not to give away the game too early.

“Thank you Saito San.” Delaney said, retaking control of the room. “And finally you, Mrs. Hildebrand,” nodding gravely at Lorena. “You alone could not have expected to be here amongst us in these deliberations, but our charter decrees that we have one representative from the main body of passengers on this jury. You are here to speak for what you think is best, but your voice represents the two million passengers we still have stored here on the Foil. What do you say?”

Lorena Hildebrand, that troublesome unknown, finally took a tiny sip of her champagne and stood before addressing us, smoothing down the rumples in her tidy jacket. “Well it’s an honor; I never expected to be on this jury with you fine folks. I certainly have less experience in matters of science and technology as you all have, but it would take a fool to not see the opportunity that’s come knocking.” Her voice began to waver and her bright eyes became dotted with tears. She looked around, each of our faces expectant.

“But all the same the answer seems clear to me, we have no choice but to leave.” She let forth in a shaking whisper.

And the bridge erupted into chaos.

--

All the world’s luxury can’t solve an existential crisis.

I found myself the next evening back on the bridge hours before anyone else arrived for the next round of deliberations, seeking solace at the bottom of a whiskey glass. The previous night had ended in absolute bedlam. When that up-jumped Voice of the People declared her opposition we had all nearly jumped down her throat. Liam had to physically intervene before Marquez could lay hands on her. He abruptly called the session and Marquez was dragged off bellowing about how she wouldn’t be denied this planet. It was an irritation to have to extend deliberations to be sure, but a minor one at that. Surely Lorena would come around.

We ended on a frayed note, but it was Delaney’s revelation that had turned the room upside down. Thirteen hundred years. How the hell had it been that long? Of course, Lorena was right, none of us were ever seeing Earth again. We knew the deal when we agreed to come aboard. But it was one thing to sign the paperwork, another to sit there at the bar and look at the route we had traveled, to really see what this new world had cost. I sat at the bar under all the carefully curated splendor with the smoky peat of a fine single malt doing it’s best to burn away the cryosickness, contemplating the maps and struggling to understand just how far we’d come.

The deliberations had started to come apart when Delaney dropped that bomb, so it was no wonder that our reaction to dissent had turned a bit ugly. I’d slipped out the previous evening shortly after Marquez was dragged out and wandered slowly down the long halls of the ship back to my staterooms. The Foil provided an adequate amount of comfort for the jurors, suites nestled in along the hull at a comfortable 1g all with access to the bridge, gym, gardens, and observation deck, although what passed for ‘walking distance’ here on the ship was a bit suspect. I had to laugh the first time I walked from my rooms to the bridge, it was certainly further than I’d walked on Earth in years. Of all the things I’d expected to encounter in space, long walks were far from the top of the list.

The rooms were comfortable and sharply decorated, the walls hewn from asteroidal rock, a “window” display showing a stabilized image of the system we approached. Still, just a bright star set against the swirling backdrop of the Milky Way. If you knew where to look you could just pick out two of the jovian planets gleaming in the blue sunlight. The gym was large and well-appointed, Marquez and the priest seemed set on beating their way out of cryo through physical exercise. As opposed to Marchand, the Astrophysicist who spent her days either in her rooms, almost certainly flooding every available screen with telescopic data, or up on the observation deck staring out into space. I suppose I should have seen the addiction at first glance.

I first encountered her gaunt form up on the observation deck. It was certainly a technological marvel, a great glass orb at the prow of the ship that could be drawn forth to let you float freely amongst the stars. Although now that we were decelerating, the ship had turned about and we looked back away from the system we were approaching. Nonetheless, the view was overwhelming. When I had floated in silently that first day next to her, tears ran silently from her dark, enraptured eyes.

“Que c’est beau.” Her first words to me paper soft, yet filling the void in which we floated. “I never set out to find heaven, but it found me nonetheless.”

Certainly, it was beautiful. We could float there beneath this great dome and watch the great spray of the Milky Way spin methodically around the sky. It was worth a moment of silent reflection, but clearly I was not seeing what this beguiled soul was witnessing. I left her to her contemplations.

Delaney, Yun, and her highness the Voice of the People all preferred the gardens. A few well-manicured acres beneath an arching ceiling that mimicked Earth sky, meant to ground us and provide a dose of normalcy in our lives. They’d walk and read and meditate, seek inner clarity, however it could be found. I tried my luck here as well. But after a short while, the artificiality of it all began to burn into the edges of my vision and set my head to pounding. Gardens like this struck me as manicured monstrosities back on Earth, far from the symbiotic beauty of a proper Japanese garden; it was even worse here shrouded by a television sky.

So I set off on the insufferably long, dull walk to the bridge. It must’ve been several miles through the cool halls, and always done under our own power. What were those Delaney engineers playing at? Would a train or car system have been so hard to install? And in my suite, I’d been provided an expansive kitchen and a well-stocked pantry of staples, then was left to my own devices. Were they sadistically chasing some end of self-sufficiency? Surely the ship could have prepared meals if they’d built in the functionality.  I seldom had cause to cook back home, so distaste for the work and the lingering queasiness of cryo had conspired to keep me from eating for days at a time. I could not wait to make landfall and begin constructing the new Saito estate, where privacy, reality, and help would be available in reasonable quantities.

No, the bridge was where I was most comfortable, and I made my way back there hours before the deliberations began. The splendor of the room was warmed by soft music filling the vaulting ceiling —now a plucking koto then a mournful slide guitar— and by great works of art filling the display above as selected by the ship. Today, a misty Enlightenment-era piece of some rolling, verdant landscape the likes of which had disappeared long before I came into the world. But most important was the robotized bar that would keep my glass fresh with smoky single malt chilling around a crystalline ball of ice, and ask no questions. Although I was beginning to suspect it wouldn’t ever allow me to get properly drunk. My glass would remain topped, and the whiskey always had the peaty fire I craved to beat back the lingering nausea of cryo, but some combination of chemicals in my glass and in the air held me at a level of mild social lubrication.

Still, I was determined to find out for myself. I whiled the hours away, sitting at the bar draining rounds, pouring over maps of how far we’d come, maps of the new world, maps of the ship on my tab. I had access to nearly all of the Foil’s libraries and could have spent my time learning just about anything I desired but instead found myself flipping idly through maps, existential dread barely held at bay.

I dove into the wisdom held by the CRS Delaney’s Foil. What a pitiable name for humanity’s dying hope. Not only had Yvette Delaney had the hubris to demand her name be slapped across every ship in the fleet, we even held on to that anachronistic prefix. Corporate Registered Ship. At least in the British navy HMS held an air of royalty and service and self respect. CRS showed our true colors, a populace rolled by unstoppable capitalist engines, as if the corporate registration were the most notable aspect of this vessel, not the ingenuity or the perseverance or thousands of years of collective knowledge she contained. Hollow name or no though, she held our hope and our wisdom, into which I numbly submerged hoping to find solace.

Even in idle lethargy, there were discoveries to be made. Flipping through maps of the ship in its current configuration I found another curious open space along the hull, about halfway down the ship. I flipped to an internal cam view of the space and nearly spat my drink. I saw rolling hills under a pearl grey sky. Great stands of trees off in the distance diminishing into the haze. And atop a rise in this most improbable of places sat a simple, squat house shaded by a pair of towering sycamore. Where the garden was pruned and manicured and refined within an inch of its life, this place was genuinely both verdant and wild. Riots of different grasses and brambles grew where they would. Plots of wheat, corn, and oats grew unbounded eventually mixing in with the other grasses. Several great raised beds in front of the farmhouse were filled with an eruption of greenery. Gardens growing in the full vigor of summer.

And amongst it all, a person. I shifted my view around the compound and found a solitary figure out behind the house, barefoot in the soft grass tossing handfuls of feed out to a brood of chickens. She wore her hair short —falling just over her eyes when she reached down for another handful of feed—and a set of neatly washed coveralls. I sat enraptured, watching this soul beat the well-worn tracks of her daily life. Feeding the chickens and putting them out into a new paddock. Moving her solitary cow over to a new pasture. Tending the garden beds, harvesting some greens and peppers that had just ripened. Then she disappeared into the workshop behind the house. 

I shifted perspective once again, now peering down unseen from a corner of the workshop where she sat at a pottery wheel, framed neatly by the sliding door of the shop. She hummed lightly while she worked, deft hands drawing up a tall, graceful pitcher before setting it gently aside to await firing in the wood-fueled kiln she had built just outside.

So this was the maintenance crew. Of course, I knew from my briefings that berths had been set aside for crew that would live alone aboard the ship and take care of any problems that the ship could not repair itself. But it was another thing to peer down into their world like some nosy, omniscient god. I had no idea they were allocated so much interior space for a homestead, although the ship certainly had space to spare. These poor, lonesome souls had sacrificed years of their waking lives to live like this, finding their own path to survival, living at the beck and call of the ship’s artificial mind. They gave up living years, their homes, their sanity, and now almost all of their privacy for their unenviable berths. 

This particularly unlucky woman, the ship informed me, was currently working her second waking stint, our extended flight time slowly burning through the years of all her peers. What torment she must have faced, waking up once again not to a new world but to another five solitary years in waking limbo. Still, as I looked down from my secret vantage I saw not a face of despair or exhaustion or hopelessness, but contentment.

And it was jealousy that filled me then, of all things. I would’ve rather died than take one of those maintenance berths. Your life traded away, sacrificing yourself to the lowest rungs of a new society. But here was this woman, three years into her second stint, no idea that the ship was gradually approaching our new home, no idea if she’d wake up the next time to a new planet or another five years of lonely torment. And all the same, she sat there making pitcher after pitcher, grey light flooding in from a sky that was beginning to threaten rain. She looked like a soul who had found peace, even in the least likely of places.

Meanwhile, I sat on a bridge filled with gaudy expectation —my only companions willing to climb over the bodies of all the maintenance crew and many more besides to ensure that their ambitions, their fields, their families came out on top in the new world— being fed by a robotic bar that wouldn’t even let me get properly drunk. It must have been hours I spent sitting there at the bar, staring down into her world through my tab, hypnotized by a life I could never live and a peace I would likely never find. Until at last Hector Yun sidled in, breaking my reverie. 

“Get a load of this Hector.” I croaked as he sat on the stool next to me, sliding over my tab showing the woman beginning to stoke her kiln even as fat drops of rain began to descend from her manufactured sky.

He let out a low whistle as he studied the video feed. “Good lord, they’re still keeping them awake?”

“I guess so,” I replied softly. “Ship says this one’s three years through her second stint. Apparently her first go-round she was the resident knife-maker, now she’s turned her focus towards pottery.”

“I’d always heard the ships encouraged the crew to develop hobbies.” He said, eyes glued to the tab, flipping through the various perspectives we could see. “Something about mental occupation and skill mastery is meant to help preserve cognitive function through extended isolation.” He panned through a few more angles before pushing the tab back. “I can’t look at this anymore, it’s like reading someone’s bloody diary.” 

Spinning around on his stool he took a long savoring sip from his cocktail and looked up at the chandelier dazzling down from the ceiling with a sigh. As much as our lives had been set on competitive tracks I couldn’t bring myself to hate Hector Yun, or even really dislike him. From the time we were both born we were sculpted and trained for the betterment of our families, our lives neatly laid out before us. The schooling, the training, the discipline, the editing of our very genomes would’ve been matched step for step by the other. Always seeking an edge, and always being met by a game opponent. It was hard for something like kinship not to emerge.

He took another sip, a gin drink mixed with some stimulants from proprietary Yun floral extracts no doubt designed to keep him sharp while giving the illusion of a man letting his guard down. 

“This cryosickness is an absolute devil, aye.” He commiserated. “I thought I was about to beat it after my first couple of days awake, but now it seems like it won’t let go. I’ve been hoping to burn it out of me with some UV exposure in that gaudy garden, but it seems like you’ve found a better strategy. A fine glass of grog has solved many an ill for thousands of years, why stop now?”

“Why stop now.” I agreed, with a raise of my glass. “It almost makes you sympathize with Delaney.”

He chortled, nearly spilling his drink. “Bloody likely.”

“Eight years of this shit Hector?” I went on. “Five times coming off the ice. I feel like a bit of my soul has been ripped away just from the once. Maybe it’ll grow back, but maybe this is just the price we pay...”

“Oi it’s a fucking game Saito, and you’re playing it just the same. Who the hell d’you think you’re talking to?” He spun to face me, lights dancing in his dark eyes. “Am I supposed to believe that a little cryo dethaw has put all the stubborn resolve of that Irish and Latino blood of his on the run? Or your’s, Saito San? Your family has been grinning and bearing some horrific shit for the past two centuries. Hell mate, I watched you leave the Park twins to the dogs when you decided they were stepping onto your turf. There’s no cushy colonial gig waiting for those two poor bastards. You expect me now to believe that you’re struck by Delaney’s sob story?” He let forth a mirthless chuckle. “No, you two angry fucks see the same thing I do. Opportunity. Delaney wants us back on our heels, feeling sorry for him. But I’m not buying it, and frankly you’re not either.”

Hector always did have a way of cutting through the bullshit. All the same, it was hard not to feel the veracity of Delaney’s claimed plight. Over the years I’d seen the great brick of a man look livid, joyous, pensive, and obstinate, our history of engagements at lobbying events went back decades. But I’d never seen him look tired, never seen him look wary, which is exactly how he struck me that evening when he walked onto the bridge. He walked lightly across the gleaming floor for such a big man. His shoes, neatly polished. His sleeves rolled up, ready to get to work. But his eyes, usually vibrantly blue, looked worn and greyed despite the act of vigorous composure he was trying so hard to put on. Let Hector not take this man at his word at his own peril. Liam Delaney crossed to the bar where a pint of dark bitter ale had silently been set for him.

“Good evening gents.” He greeted, raising his glass to us and took a satisfied first sip. “I trust we’ll be hearing plenty from you two in opposition of Mrs.Hildebrand’s stance.”

Hector raised his glass back with a mocking smile, “You can bet your bottom dollar on it boss.”

“I’d expect no less,” Delaney quipped back. “I’ll leave you two to your conspiring.” He walked to a plush set of seats in a far corner to study new observational data on his tab.

Once Delaney was safely out of earshot Hector let out a low whistle. “That’s the rub of it though aye, Saito? Mrs. Lorena Hildebrand, Voice of the People,” he sneered with mock reverence. “What game is she playing at?”

It was undoubtedly the question at the fore of all our minds. How could this randomly selected soul stand up in front of a panel this qualified and dig her heels in? What did she want? 

“I did about as much digging as the ship would let me this morning.” I confided. “There’s plenty of biography on her in the library, but it all looks squeaky clean. At first, I thought she must’ve been a plant from the Osney Corp. or some other European conglomerate, but there’s either no relation or they’ve gotten much better at covering their tracks.” I took a slow, burning sip. “Frankly, I’m not sure which prospect I find more troubling.”

“Aye. It’s a bother to be sure,” he agreed. “Maybe she just hopes she can get herself set up nicely if she provides some resistance, grabs a little leverage, and she’s stupid enough to think she can get away with it with this pack of vultures circling around her.”

“I thought Marquez was about ready to take her head off,” I concurred. “Makes sense, I guess, for the resident biologist. Marchand though... I thought I saw a gleam of hope in her when Hildebrand dug in; I imagine she may be an easy convert. Spends all her time running telescopic studies or staring out into space, as far as I can tell she’s the first person in history to get high directly from astronomical observation data. She probably could give a shit if we stay or leave, but we’ll have a hell of a time getting her back down to sleep.” I paused for a smoky sip. “And the priest?”

“Ah, who gives a shit about the priest?” He said draining his glass and passing it across the bar for another. “He’ll find his way to God wherever we may roam. And if he needs to start a mission to convert alien phytoplankton to the Faith, well that’s what he’ll do.”

On cue, the two scientists and the priest stepped onto the bridge and settled in at the far end of the bar. Drinks began to flow. Conversation rose gently in the great stone vault. Delaney abandoned his chair to come and share some new telescopic imagery with Hector and I of the planet. It looked like about an 80% probability that the life forms, if that’s what they were, were contained to the oceans. Maybe some alien mudfish were beginning to poke their heads above the surface and get some ideas about the new territory they saw. Not if we have anything to say about it, I thought.

The ship filled the room with lively flamenco, and the display switched over showing a great oil painting of violent surf crashing against some ragged South American coastline. A violent entry into a new world. Despite the sickness and anxiety we all endured the mood began to lift, on this bridge that felt like anything but what it was.

And then she entered. Silence swept down the bar as our heads turned towards the entrance, leaving only the trailing notes of a wavering guitar hanging in the air. Looking smart and refined, her clothes humble yet exactingly worn, a forest green jacket sitting warmly against her dark skin. Lorena Hildebrand knew she was the cause of this sudden silence, hell she’d likely been avoiding us all day, readying herself for the onslaught of opposition she was sure to face. In spite of it all she greeted us all with a warm smile, grey eyes twinkling beneath the chandelier.

As courteous as ever, Delaney jumped to his feet, grabbed the flute of champagne that was awaiting her off the bar and stepped lightly over to greet her personally. A friend in her corner, even if they didn’t see eye to eye. Well, he’d be a better politician than me, I thought. His unwavering manners, warm smile, and acute attention to all the little challenges that make up a life made him someone you wanted to like, wanted to look up to. But would he be a good leader? I had my doubts. 

This new world would require cunning and precision and hard decision after hard decision. Could we rely on somebody who went chasing after every hurt feeling and stubbed toe to hold such an outsized role in our new society? No. This was my most reliable line to take him down. He’d do well in a political role, lending needed weight and goodwill to a good plan, but that plan needed to come from someone who saw things as they were. Someone bred and trained and built to cut impossible knots. Someone, like me.

After a few minutes, conversation once again began to fill the stony, domed ceiling. Drinks were topped up, guards came down just a little bit. The ship as if to cue us to our seats switched the display over once more to the planet spinning silently in its orbit. Today just a little bit clearer than the day before. Megastructure of the coastlines now in a discernible relief as they turned into night and glowed with blue-green life.

“If everyone is ready,” Delaney called out, deep voice cutting through the chatter. “Please come to the table and we can begin tonight’s deliberations.” We all shuffled silently to the long, gleaming table, rich grain luminous in the light raining down from above. “Before we begin, I’d like to remind you all that we are here to reach a consensus. We all will have as long as we need to make our case, and we owe it to each other and every other soul on this ship to hear everyone out.” He shot a steely glance over to Marquez who looked down, cowed by Delaney’s admonishment. “What we will not have, however, are personal nor physical attacks on fellow jurors,” he said, scolding with every syllable. “Along with the duty of calling a jury, I also have the right to reconstitute it if needed.” Now the whole table cast gazes down, feeling like petulant schoolchildren. “Suffice to say if you cannot absorb and respond to an argument on its merits, then get ready to go back on the ice.” He broke the tension with a long draught of his ale and a beguiling smirk.

“Right then, let’s get to it,” he said, now smiling. “We have some interesting new information on our planet we need to get on the table first.” A murmur rolled down the table. “Every day our imaging and spectroscopy array gets closer, and every day our picture of the planet will get a little bit clearer; in about three days we’ll have as clear a picture as we’ll get, short of establishing an orbital observation system which we’d only do if we decide to stay.”

The display changed over, on cue as always, to a strikingly enhanced image of the planet. Where the previous day only blurry outlines had been visible, now we were able to see very discernible coastlines and cloud formations that looked very much like home. The telescopic array was actually accelerating towards the planet even as the ship slowed its approach allowing much faster improvements in clarity than we’d see from the ship, they’d blow by and reconvene at a Lagrange point trailing the planet in its orbit to await their next task. 

Most importantly though, we could see the green formations in much sharper detail. Vast structures weaved through the verdant masses, not the billowing clouds you’d expect of eroding oxidized soil nor the rigid structure of great crystals, but vast flowing webs branching and undulating in organic rhythm. Marquez beamed up in wild wonder, Father Joshua bowed his head in silent prayer.

“Now as you can see we have a fair bit more clarity today, currently we have optical resolution down to about four hundred meters. It gives us a meaningful look at coastlines and land structures and helps us compare similarities and differences in cloud movement to Earth. But most strikingly we can see a great deal more detail in the green formations. You’ll all notice the web-like structures, with our current resolution you can appreciate how large these formations must be. Also interestingly, we’ve been able to do some preliminary mapping of the ocean floor. It seems they trail off of the dry land in areas where the ocean is only a couple hundred meters deep. Sticking to the continental shelves if you will. The deep oceans may be barren, or may contain more structures we won’t be able to see unless we head down there and start poking around with some submarines.”

He paused for another gratified sip, his smirk now a full-fledged grin. “Finally, thermal imaging shows that these areas are warm, much warmer than we’d expect for shallow waters. It appears these formations not only make discernible structures they also make heat.”

“Gracias a dios.” Marquez whispered softly. “If we thought it before this all but proves it, what hypothesis besides life can we realistically offer?”

“Do be a good scientist and keep an open mind Dr. Marquez,” Delaney shot back playfully. “But yes, all this and the atmospheric anomalies do make a strong case for life, just not exactly life as we know it.’

“If we assume that these formations are living, and that they are responsible for the heat and the atmospheric chlorine we’re seeing that obviously adds a great deal of considerations for us.” He went on, resuming his usual gravity. “Beyond the broad strokes, we have neither the ability nor the right to decide how we handle colony formation. But we should consider the implications of our contact.”

“Like we shouldn’t be so cavalier with the notion of scrubbing the atmosphere before we even set foot on the surface.” Marquez shot in, sneering at Hector.

“Or we may consider how we could keep ourselves separate with sea walls or even floating colonies if the deep sea proves to be the best place to keep ourselves isolated.” Delaney put in more helpfully.

Oh, eat your goddamn heart out Hector, I thought. No atmospheric scrubbing and plenty of need for sea walls and aquatic habs? I’d never been a religious man but it sure seemed like God was smiling down on the house of Saito with Fansa122b. I looked over at my rival, his dark eyes revealing nothing as they l pondered the display, flipping through image after image of alien coastline. Still, I could sense the wheels turning in his head, plotting move after countermove with this new information. Can’t plot your way out of a shit hand Mr. Yun, I thought and took a long, satisfying sip of fiery whiskey.

“At any rate, as we stand we have six votes to stay and one dissenter.” Liam Delaney proclaimed, bringing the room back together. “Lorena, I have to say I admire you, a lesser person would have probably fallen into line rather than stick their neck out no matter their convictions. I appreciate you standing up though, and I believe that your dissent will lead to valuable discussion. But nonetheless, your unenviable task is now to bring us all around to your way of thinking.” He raised his glass to her. “You have as long as you need, and you have the floor.”

The thin frame of Lorena Hildebrand rose from her seat near the head of the table, the glowing image of Fansa122b loomed behind her; untouched, her glass of champagne bubbled away in front of her seat. She looked small in this grandiose place, amongst these titans of industry. Her soft voice, if wielded by a lesser soul, would have left her overlooked in the world. Not her. Not today. She stood and looked each of us square in the eye and began forcefully. 

“I am not your equal.” Her words hit the table like lead, and silence echoed in their wake.

“Not anything close to it,” she went on, words ringing like condemnation. “You are the heads of proud houses, great corporations, noble fields of research. It’s no wonder why you are here. You were either literally created for this role, or fought with everything you’ve ever had to get here. And you knew, leaving Earth, that you would be shouldered with the responsibility of deciding humanity’s future.” I looked around the seated faces bewildered at these words that were at once so self-deprecating and so denouncing.

“And who am I? A half-blood Afrikaner girl who got lucky in marriage. A woman whose husband had just enough to sell out and get us and our son off a dying planet. Lucky? Undoubtedly. Distinguished? Not in the slightest. I’m told I’m meant to speak for the others on this ship, those not from the great conglomerates, or research institutes. Those of us just hoping to find life on a new world that doesn’t have our doom lurking around every corner.” I was impressed by her in a way, even as I was steeling myself in expectation of a tirade of communist drivel. “Yes, I’m the unwitting, unwanting, unbelievably selected Voice of the People. A mocking title I’m sure, and one I certainly want no part of. But here I am, laden with undesired responsibility, and all I can think of is how my little family will find our way in the new world.’

“I’ve spent almost every waking moment on this ship trying to figure out why. Why me? Why pull some random citizen out of stasis to sit on this jury at all? For a mission with a contingency plan for everything this sure doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. I know the UN had to throw all of its weight into getting me this seat, and for what? So one old lady can sit here among you and think of her little family in her little world?” She stopped, trailing off into silence. Her graying hair fell forward covering her eyes that held so much life, as the planet spun silently above her.

“The only thing that makes any sense is that even this, this doubt, is planned. Maybe some smarter folks than I reckon that just a normal old lady worrying about her family can reliably speak for so many millions. I’m not a scientist or a politician or a leader, just a woman of the new world.” She drew herself up, dark skin glowing warmly. “And I have to have faith that this is the way it is meant to be. I won’t ever understand the details half as well as any of you, but maybe that’s the point, my distance may give me perspective that can prove valuable. At least that’s what I hope.’

“So I stood against you all for the same reason that all of you would like to colonize this planet, because of the life. We have a great deal of duty to the passengers of this ship, but now we also have a great deal of duty to the life down there.” Her voice was building strength. “We all likely have differing views as to the purpose of this mission. To find a new foothold for humanity. To satisfy our primal drive for exploration. To simply escape a hopeless future. But superseding them all, I believe, is the need to keep the spark of life alight.’

“Mr. Delaney,” She implored, earnestly. “You say that you have been awoken to five other planets before this.”

“That is correct.” he agreed, clearly curious as to where this was all heading.

“That’s five Earth-like planets, five of our best guesses for hospitable places to live and they were all not only devoid of life but all actively hostile to it. Is that correct?” Lorena lead on.

“Indeed.” he hesitantly agreed.

“Now, I’ll be the first to admit that five planets is hardly a large sample size, but this was choosing from a large region of space. These were our best guesses. It’s taken 1,342 years to find anywhere remotely livable, and when we get here we happen upon a miracle. Life beyond our own.” She paused letting the gravity of her words take hold. “Our purpose is not to explore and catalog systems, it is to find a new home. We’ve wandered for more than a millennia and found that planets like this are in fact the exception.”

“Get to your fucking point.” Marquez cut in, growing irritated. “You argue against your own position.”

“But that is the point Dr. Marquez.” Lorena asserted, meeting her gaze humbly but with great resolution. “This planet, like Earth, is a rarity. A gem. And it is already teeming with life.”

“Yes, precisely. That is why I’d like to stop beating around the bush and get down there to get on with the new discoveries.” Marquez shot back, words flying hotly from her lips.

“I know that I am not a woman of your qualifications, but—.”

“Damn right you’re not.” Marquez cut in.

“Marissa, please,” Delaney said putting up a quieting hand to the flushing biologist. “You’ll have your say in due time.” Liam Delaney, ever the politician.

“I have not your qualifications, but I am still a woman of our world.” Lorena went on, calm in the face of hostility. “I grew up a bit before you did, learning as a young girl about the fiasco that early Mars exploration turned into as more interests found their way to the planet. It should have been the refuge that humanity needed but instead, we stripped it bare before we could blink.’

“And Europa, I’m old enough to remember that debacle myself.” She went on. “What we thought was our best chance at discovering extraterrestrial life all torn to shreds by industrial ambition. Sure, we sanitized our craft as best we could laid a careful schedule of where we would land and when, but with a growing pile of competing interests it all went out the window.” She let out a low, joyless chuckle. “Oh, there’s life on Europa now, but we blew any chance we had for determining if it was truly extraterrestrial or not. It all looks like Earth-life now, is that due to panspermia or human hubris?”

“Indeed! And lessons were learned, protocols put in...” Marquez jumped in before being silenced by a glance from Delaney.

“Protocols indeed. Protocols put in place that we applied to Enceladus.” A flush was now rising to Hildebrands dark cheeks. “I believe we’re all old enough to remember this catastrophe. They put that first probe through everything one could imagine to sterilize it, and by the time we found the wreckage of that failed probe on the lip of a cryovolcano what else did we find? A colony of unbelievably hearty tardigrades happily adapting away, making their way down to the interior oceans.” She paused, taking a breath, looking around the table sternly. “Intentional or not, we are not the only colonizers we’ll bring to this new world.”

“Oh, don’t be fucking ridiculous!” Marquez jumped in, now ready to say her piece. “Those old missions didn’t have half the tech we’ve brought with us. There’s no reason to think—”

It was not Delaney’s stern reprimand that cut her off this time, but Marchand’s papery whisper. “Marissa, they ran it through the corona.”

“What?!” She demanded.

“You know better than I do.” She went on, words falling from her lips like dead leaves. “The Enceladus probe, they ran it as close to the sun as they could get it to sterilize it. Every conceivable sanitization protocol we could dream up, and then they ran it through the edge of the corona to burn off any other contaminants, just to be completely sure. All that, and it still didn’t work.”

“So what?” the irate biologist shot back. “So we’re too scared and we came all the way out here just for a scenic tour?”

“It was one thing in our home system with worlds most likely devoid of life, or if it did exist at least it was plausibly like ours. But here...” Marchand trailed off slowly, eyes rising once again to the planet spinning above us all, leaving the bridge in cavernous silence.

“But here we have greater considerations.” Lorena picked back up. “Those worlds back home, as far as we could tell, were likely lifeless. Here one quick look here tells us just the opposite. This world is teeming. I understand your desire to get down there and see what this new life is like I really do.”

“Don’t you dare speak to me like you know.” Marquez spat back. “This is my life. My work.”

“I understand the desire, but we have to at least consider the potential damage.” Hildebrand doggedly went on. “We know it looks like life, although as best I can tell we probably won’t be able to confirm the hypothesis until we set down and start taking samples. Right?”

“Right.” Marquez replied hesitantly.

“And as far as we can tell these lifeforms are green so may or may not be photosynthesizing, they produce heat, and they  likely produce the excess chlorine gas we’re seeing in the atmosphere. Right?”

Marquez was done entertaining this line of thought and held her tongue, so Delaney stepped in. “That’s right. We may improve our observations in the coming days, but that’s our best guess for now.”

“So this life is fairly Earth-like in that it may feed off the sun, it is aquatic, it appears to self-replicate and form structures, and like us it produces heat. But it is not like us in the sense that for some reason it emits a bunch of chlorine gas. Whereas if we were running this same experiment with Earth we may remark on the presence of methane or carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Do I have this all right?”

Our biologist was still being petulantly unhelpful, so Marchand spoke up. “Not only is that the notion, but those measurements were how our instruments were calibrated before leaving our home system.”

“So we have an aquatic world with comfortable temperatures and pleasant surface pressure. A bit of chlorine, that’s a problem for us, and we may discuss how we might terraform and make it more suitable later on, but it almost certainly wouldn’t be an issue for any hangers-on we bring with us.” I had to applaud, for a random passenger pulled off the ice this was a remarkably through case. She continued on with her theory.

“Dr. Marquez, we at least need to entertain the possibility that first contact is colossally detrimental, possibly even apocalyptic, for the life on this planet.” Her soft voice now barely a whisper, yet we all sat enraptured. “A few pesky tardigrades hitch a ride down on our first probe and set up shop, next thing we know they’re killing off the local flora. Or how about if we actually successfully sterilize, the metals of the probe itself could prove to be toxic, setting off ecosystem collapse. These are the worst-case-scenarios I know, but we don’t know anything...”

Marquez erupted, no longer able to hold her tongue. “Don’t know! Don’t know! Damn right, you don’t know a God damned thing! You’re out here bringing up the failures of fools long-dead, and wild theories, we have no reason to expect anything of the kind.”

“We have no reason to expect anything different.” Lorena Hildebrand held her ground, small fists planted on the rich wood of the table, meeting Marquez’s gaze unwaveringly. “I admit that these are possibly unlikely scenarios, but no matter how much orbital data we gather it seems to me that we won’t be able to rule them out.’

“The stakes are simply too high.” She went on, now nearly pleading. “Our purpose is to preserve life and help it flourish, not destroy it. We have a duty to the people on this ship, but we also have a duty to the life on this planet. To not destroy it because they happen to live on an appealing planet.” Her voice now a shaking whisper. “As I see it we won’t ever be able to eliminate that risk, and as we’ve seen life is too valuable to put in such danger.” Her words trailed off, floating lightly up into the vaulted ceiling of the bridge.

Time slowed irresistibly to a standstill as we were frozen in deafening silence. Marchand’s gossamer words finally broke the stillness. “She’s right Marissa.” All eyes turned to her graying face. “For better or for worse the planet is a great Schrodinger’s Box. It may be alive, it may not be, but as soon as we reach out to discover the truth we risk its doom. We are not built to wander, but our quest for knowledge and expansion surely doesn’t supersede the rights of these creatures to flourish on their own planet.”

Tears silently had begun to stream down the face of Dr. Marissa Marquez, her dark eyes glistening with pain as her mind opened and accepted that which it had previously shut out. “Damn you.” She whispered. “Damn you. Damn you. DAMN YOU!” In one smooth motion she stood and kicked her chair back, bellowing up into the lofted stone. She stood glaring into Lorena’s eyes, willing herself to find a counterargument raising herself higher and higher. And then suddenly she deflated as the cruel reality took hold in her mind. “Damn you.” She whispered once more as she grabbed her drink, turned on her heel, and left the bridge in stunned silence.

--

I sought solace in the void.

The next day the cryosickness brought it’s full force down upon me, and there seemed to be no escape. We had quickly adjourned after Marquez left the bridge and with sleep refusing to come I spent the night furiously researching Lorena Hildebrand. Her record in the Foil’s archives seemed to match up with her story. A girl born to lower-middle class parents on the outskirts of Durban shortly after the South African Unification, one an Afrikaner with long roots in the area the other a Namibian refugee fleeing the violence as pressure mounted from the north.

By all accounts she had acquitted herself well in school, making the best use of the remnants of the public school system in the wake of a reforging society. She’d even been able to spend some time doing post-graduate philosophy work at the University of Cape Town before ultimately being called back to Durban to care for an ailing mother. Her mother fell ill, then quickly passed, and it may have been her greatest stroke of luck, as that was where she met Elias Hildebrand, her future husband and her ticket, for a time, out of lower-class banality.

Mr. Hildebrand, it seemed, was a German expat who had leveraged a modest inheritance into a respectable stake in the South African platinum mining industry, just as the commodity was gaining value. They’d set up a nice little life outside of Durban, had a son, bought a little piece of land, and enjoyed their life. But over time the son grew, the land fallowed, and the writing on the wall became clear as the great corporations began consolidating and devouring lesser interests. To my surprise it was Saito that had actually bought them out.

In the grand scheme of things it was a paltry sum. We had certainly been in need of platinum, and other heavy metals besides, at the time and sucked up their little interest without much thought. Still, it was enough for a new life. Enough liquid assets hit their accounts to book economy passage with Delaney and hope for better luck on the new world. Better that than to fight it, to be crushed in a hostile takeover and walk away with nothing. 

It all checked out, just like my initial research had indicated, not a whiff of external influence to be found in any record I could find, public or private. Still, she had to be playing at something. Maybe she was a deep agent of a European conglomerate that hadn’t been able to afford a jury seat on the Foil, her spot paid in some backroom deal with Delaney. Who would really be here after all to enforce the UN’s desired random selection? It’d be just as easy to pull out some dedicated Osney Corp. operative for the position and keep up pretenses for the rest of the jury. It was the only theory that made any sense, even if I didn’t have a shred of evidence to prove it.

How fitting it was then for my family to force hers off of one world only for her to vex me on the next.

The sickness was bad, worse than it’d been in days. A throbbing behind the eyes. A constant, unquenchable thirst. A fatigue like nothing I’d ever known. But it was Lorena Hildebrand, Voice of the People, who stood proudly atop my pile of troubles. She was the one unknown left to me, playing a game I could not divine, to an end I could not fathom. And she was winning.

Marchand’s defection I wasn’t particularly surprised about. She had no affinity for this world, better for her to head back into the depths of interstellar space where she could feed her addiction untroubled by light or humans. So she was ready to leave at the first convenient exit. Marquez had likely been the toughest nut to crack, headstrong and the one amongst us who could truly grasp the implications of another planet teeming with life. I guess that was why Hildebrand had started with her. It was a wonderfully delivered speech, I had to hand it to her, but I could not wrap my head around the fact that it had actually worked. Were we really going to pass up an opportunity this golden because we might kill a few alien algae? Ridiculous.

But they were both flipped, and the vote was now three to four, good odds especially when you considered who the four were, but far from the sure thing we all thought we were sitting down to. The priest was worrisome. He certainly had certain theistic reasons to want to stay, especially given that there was life, although what actual value that could have to a dying church I failed to see. But he also struck me as a man who was likely to go along with whoever had spoken last. And that was worrisome.

Delaney, that thick-headed bastard, was frustratingly difficult to pin down. He certainly saw the opportunity before us, but I was becoming more and more sure that I saw something new in him. Fear. The harrowed look he tried so hard to mask behind those steel eyes spoke untold volumes about what he’d experienced over the past eight years of waking time. Again and again he made the decision to press on, to throw our lot in with the fates, and to condemn himself to another round of cryo. A man of his constitution could take a lot of abuse, but this had clearly worn him thin. I could see it. All the same though, he was a man who took his duty as foreman seriously, and his politician’s inclination meant he was prone to consider both sides of an argument even if it was just out of courtesy. That meant there was a crack in what ought to be another resolute mind, a crack where Lorena Hildebrand could wedge herself.

Hector always fancied himself a bit of a wildcard and had been careful to tread a middle path thus far in the deliberations to keep his options open. Certainly the way the cards lay things had come up aces for House Saito and not so much for House Yun. Certainly he was off in some other corner of the ship running through the same considerations I was; only he was trying to illuminate a path that could get him out of his current bind, while I was planning to hold the high ground. Hector was the only one who I was sure wanted to stay as much as I did, but he also wanted me on edge to throw me off of sure footing. So he would make noises about playing both sides, but in reality I just had to find a sufficiently juicy carrot to dangle.

It all summed up in a predicament thorny enough to vex any mind, even one like mine built for times like these. The sickness, the uncertainty, the incessant running of scenario after scenario through my frayed neurons, it nearly drove me mad. Wandering the halls of the ship, the gardens, the bridge, everything seemed to add a new twist to my dilemma. So I sought the void.

That day I found the observation deck mercifully empty, Marchand must have been off getting concentrated doses direct from the observational data, so I held myself at the edge of the entry surrounded by nothing but stars and indulgent silence. I still could not see what the astrophysicist could in this place, a spectacular view and much needed peace to be sure, but far from the enlightenment she seemed to find. All the same, I sat in that warm void and watched the stars spin slowly in their stately rotation as the ship completed spin after life giving spin. Here my mind finally began to quiet, slowly hypnotized by this stellar dance.

I have no idea how long I sat in blessed seclusion there among the heavens, but in fitting form my sanctuary was burst by none other than the Voice of the People. The portal opened behind me and her thin, dark form floated in silently beside grasping the edge of the entry to look up into the stars. I took a deep breath. Mastered myself, my frustration, my indignation. Maybe she could be won over.

She began with little more than a whisper, “Beautiful isn’t it?”

I had to laugh, “That’s what we all seem to say.”

She chuckled back, “You’re right, beautiful is probably an insufficient word. No?”

“I don’t know that our minds were really built to comprehend it all, so it’s not so surprising that words fail.”

She let the silence hang heavily for a moment. “You know, when I was a girl the night sky was as full of stories as it was full of stars.” I nodded but held my tongue, so she went on. “My mother brought me back to her town in Namibia after the unification to meet what was left of her family, those few who had survived the war. I must have been twelve years old or so. It was a challenging visit, just smelly old strangers all wanting to pinch my cheeks, dust storms would blow in off the desert almost every day choking the very air, and the heat -my god the heat- I thought it would almost certainly kill me. I wanted nothing more than to go home, even if home was just back to a dreary old Durban apartment block, it was better than this strange place on the edge of the world.’

“But then the night came,” she went on reverently. “The sky would clear, the heat would be blown away by cool evening winds, and after dinner I would walk out onto the near dunes with my mother. The skies would come alive. Stars like nothing I’d ever seen before filled my eyes, stretching from the little twinkling lights of town up through the zenith and off over the dark, marching dunes. I’d never seen anything so beautiful.’

“And my mother would tell me stories. Heroic epics, forbidden romances, lurking monsters, noble kings, they were all there glowing amongst the stars. Even I, a little girl from Durban, knew that people were out there too, the Delaney’s reshaping what humans could do and be out in space. Your family, showing us that a life amongst the stars could be a life well lived. But my mother showed me something too. That the skies are not just filled with stars and planets and moons and asteroids, they’re filled with memories.”

I let her trail off, and after a moment I said, “And I suppose this is when you tell me to consider the memories of all the algae and plankton and sponges swimming around down there on this new planet.”

She laughed back dryly, unwilling to be put off by my snark. “Wouldn’t be much to consider would it? Even if there was intelligent life down there who knows if they’d look up and see their own stories in the stars or just specks of light awaiting conquest or if they could see anything at all.’

“I’m sure I understand a lot less than the rest of you,” she continued. “I wasn’t prepared for this task. I didn’t have the education or the training or the briefing you all have had. All I know is that we’re looking at a miracle, here up in space and down there with the plankton and the algae and the sponges. That there should be stars and planets and moons is a miracle; and that there should be life swimming around down there, that’s a miracle too. It’s awe-inspiring no matter which way you look. I don’t know what the best thing to do is here, but I know it’s worth weighing both sides before we decide.”

She left no room for argument, so I simply nodded and looked back at the twirling stars. Silence settled back over us for a time and he hung in something rather like companionable peace for a time before she lightly grabbed my shoulder and said. 

“Come along, we’re going to be late.”

We stepped on to the bridge just as everyone was taking their seats for the evening’s deliberations. The ship had decided on displaying an expansive landscape from the Ming dynasty, all plummeting mountains and cantilevered trees fighting their way free of an all consuming fog. I looked around and noticed everyone had declined to patronize the bar for the evening. So much for social lubrication helping create consensus. Nonetheless I got myself a whiskey cooled by a large sphere of ice, trying in vain to relieve the throbbing pressure that continued to build behind my eyes.

Once we were all seated it was Marquez who broke the leaden silence. “After review of the latest observations and a thorough discussion, Dr. Marchand and I have decided to change our votes,” confirming what I had already surmised. “The latest evidence all but certifies what we had suspected, but in the end Lorena, you’re right,” she said more earnestly than I’d ever heard her. Hildebrand for her part nodded humbly. “There’s no amount of orbital observation that could really tell us the nature of the life down there. It could be just like earth, it could be like nothing we’d ever imagined, I want nothing more than to wade around in those oceans and find out but the truth is it’s too much of a risk.’

“We could try and sanitize probes to collect samples to our hearts content before we send them down only to find that the very alloys of our tools trigger unfathomable effects. Or more likely some stubborn extremophile bacteria would survive our cleaning and get plopped down in the middle of a friendly ocean and get to colonizing before we ever had a chance. If we trigger ecosystem collapse we’d barely be able to detect it let alone do anything to prevent it. And that’s just thinking about the research, actual colonization is a whole different ball game.” She went on quietly, the words clearly wounding her with every syllable.

Doggedly, she persevered, “We could go down there and treat it like a totally inhospitable planet, domed cities, suits, the lot. Still it would just be a matter of time before all the microorganisms that come with us would get out, plus the aforementioned risk of contamination with refined metals. If we look at it this way the planet’s apparent hospitality starts to become more of a liability than an asset. We’d need to live in suits, constantly enclosed in our domes, all the while the world outside would tempt us to leave it all behind. I mean dios mio, it looks so much like home. Nobody was ever tempted out of their suits in the Mars colony, no one ever thought an afternoon stroll on Titan was a good idea. No, pressure to end the quarantine would mount and mount and eventually burst and likely spell disaster for this nascent local life.”

Her voice was now audibly shaking. “The way I see it the only way to colonize a planet this hospitable would be to go for full terraforming. Maybe the life down there would survive, probably not. Life on our own planet couldn’t survive our impact, I can’t see how these untouched ecosystems would fare any better.” She drew in a breath girding her resolve. “Even if we put the probability of successful colonization and ecosystem preservation at an unfathomably rosy 50% it’s still too great of a risk.” She looked at the astrophysicist who gravely nodded her support. “In the end, Dr. Marchand and I believe that this whole venture is about the preservation of life, human and otherwise. Colonization will be a monumental task no matter where we decide to land, the life on this planet not only poses constraints on us that increase chances of colony failure, but we have to consider the life an end in itself. This planet has a right to live and I, for all that I want, don’t have a right to put it in jeopardy.”

We let her words diminish, rising up into the stony arches above us. Hildebrand nodded her approval but held her silence. I took a long sip of whiskey, nearly draining my glass, willing myself to find the strength to bear this insanity with composure. In the end though, it was Hector who brought it all crumbling down.

“That is remarkably well said Dr. Marquez,” he began, rising from his seat. “Like all of you I have been pouring over the new observations every day, and like all of you I see a planet of extraordinary promise and extraordinary responsibility.” An impish grin began to creep across his face that made me lean in, analyzing every word. What was this wry bastard trying? “It seems clear that the atmosphere is almost certainly remarkably Earth-like, I feel very confident that the technologies Yun International could bring to this new world would easily help us, as Dr. Marquez suggests, go whole hog on terraforming.” His words posed the counterargument, his tone invited judicious consideration, his eyes bespoke a deeper plan.

“A simple elimination of the gaseous chlorine we’re seeing with scrubbers, add some stabilising nitrogen and get some of our photosythesizers down there to up the oxygen in the mix, my best guess is that we could take that afternoon stroll, no suit no mask no nothing, within fifteen years.” He paused to look around and make sure he had the room’s full attention. “That’s better than our wildest dreams when we set out. All the same Dr. Marquez is right, our actions will have consequences and we will never be able to eliminate the risk to the local flora. That’s why I, on behalf of Yun International, am opting to take the high road and change my vote. We should leave this planet be.”

I couldn’t take any more of it. “Who the fuck do you think you’re kidding Hector?!” I exploded. “There are two million frozen humans aboard this ship at risk every single day we stay out in space. You’re all of a sudden ready to turn your back on all of them on all this opportunity for some algae? Well I’m not buying it.”

“There’s nothing to be bought Saito San.” he said with mocking politeness. “Dr. Marquez and Mrs. Hildebrand make sound, compelling arguments and I have changed my mind.”

“Bullshit! Every new round of observations has come in better for Saito and worse for Yun, now you’re willing to sell us all out to get rid of a bad hand? Have at least a semblance of spine Hector.” I seethed, words dripping venom.

“This has nothing to do with business,” he replied with infuriating calm. “Perhaps you need to reconsider your duty here on this jury if all you see is a business opportunity.”

That was it. He could sell us out for his own gain, that was the game. But to stand there and pretend like he was so much holier-than-thou talking about my duty it was too much. 

“You son of a bitch!” I yelled, and launched myself across the table at him.

I made it about halfway across before Liam Delaney’s muscular arm caught me around the neck and flung me back over my chair in one smooth, irresistible motion. My feet caught on its low back and sent the back of my head careening to a neat collision with the polished stone. And then, blackness.

--

I hid in the past.

The next day I awoke back in my staterooms, head patched up for the most part.Now I had the joy of contending with a throbbing in both the front and back of my skull. Excellent. Just what I needed as this infuriating jury went more and more sideways, further and further from rationality and control and into whatever madness Hildebrand was working towards. I couldn’t bear to face it. I needed time to plan and find a new strategy, I needed my shame, that vestigial emotion, to subside. 

Not shame that Delaney had taken me down so easily, no one awake on the ship would actually challenge the man physically; it seemed likely that he hadn’t even meant for things to get as rough as they did, my chair got in the way and finished the job for him. No, it was shame at letting myself be driven from my senses by the mocking grin of Hector Yun. I don’t know how many times over the years I’d found myself across the negotiating table from him with his chummy smiles and his back-slapping and his flights of fancy. He was everything I aimed not to be. Every time I sat across from him composure and cool-headed rationality allowed me to outflank him. And now, when it mattered most, that bastard had somehow brought me down to his level. It was all too much, so I hid.

The past was never far away on the CRS Delaney’s Foil. With the ship’s libraries always accessible on my tab all I had to do was ask. So I spent days holed up in my staterooms, pouring over my research on the other jurors, sure that the cryosickness was keeping me from remembering the one key detail that would unlock everything and put it all back to rights. Then as it became clear that there was no silver bullet I began to slip backwards through time.

Even though the ship had left Earth on a one-way journey the communication hardly stopped when we departed. As we steadily accelerated into the abyss, photons came flying through the void bringing news, bringing messages, bringing all the memories of those now long past with them. I started at the beginning, finding news headlines from the weeks after we departed, as if I had just been on some long-overdue holiday and was only now catching up on what I’d missed. In truth, my mind couldn’t really grasp how much time had actually passed. Then I jumped forward months, then years, then decades. Skipping lightly through the years like a leaf caught in an updraft.

It was all the same. The rivalries between the great conglomerates continued on, the environment continued to degrade, the ships continued to depart. At first I dove deep into the stories surrounding Saito interests, checking in on how brothers and aunts and nieces had fared in a world I knew only too well. As if I could simply step back into the life I had left. It was intoxicating. Escapism in a world that felt real, because it was real. But time went on. Deals were made and collapsed, triumphs were had, losses were covered and gradually the names became less and less familiar. I referred to a family tree on which my name was a shockingly high branch.

Humanity muddled along, as we always have. No worst-case-scenarios came to life, but neither did any best-cases. No miracle cures came along to solve our deepening core crisis. Power was all but completely consolidated into the conglomerates; governmental residue was swept up into the corporate structures. Some welcomed the changes, others protested, most just got on with their lives the best way that they could. Shorelines eroded, species disappeared, vast populations fled the environmental destruction bringing outrage, and suffering. But then we’d adapt, as we always have. Homo Sapiens we called ourselves, the wise ones, better would be Homo Mollis, the resilient ones. From my distant vantage, skipping through the years, I could see how much we lost and still we went on finding new ways to survive, finding new ways to create a life well-lived.

Gradually the news abated, then slowed, then trickled to a stop. Inexorably the space and time we’d covered took their toll. At first, the colony ships were living memories, then stories handed down through the generations, but eventually- like all things- we were relegated to the pages of history. After two hundred years the updates slowed to annual data dumps including just the news headlines and technical discoveries for the ship to update its libraries with. The cost of sending radio transmissions this far gradually closed our connection to home. 

After five hundred years the updates stopped completely. There was nothing in those final connections to indicate a coming societal collapse, but I suppose we always had the ability to do that rather quickly if we put our minds to it. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that we’d truly destroyed ourselves though. As I bored through the pages of history I’d seen too much resilience in the face of catastrophe. No, more likely spending the resources to send radio transmissions this far out had fallen out of favor culturally. But all the same I couldn’t eliminate the possibility. Maybe runaway environmental collapse had finally done us in, maybe warheads after eons collecting dust in their silos had finally been called upon, maybe some virus had made hay in our sprawling cities killing its host before we could do a thing about it. It was not our place to know aboard the Foil.

Three days into my burrowing a soft knock came to my door. The sound was barely audible but it sucked me mercilessly back through the years and into reality. To this year on this ship with these people. I swung open the heavy, inlaid door open to reveal the frocked figure of Father Joshua; I had to stifle my surprise. He looked up amicably and held out an analgesic tonic like a peace offering and said mildly, “How’s the head?”

I stepped back to let him in, appraising this unexpected visitor. “Here to convert me Father? Or just here to lay a little signature Catholic guilt on my absence from the jury?”

“Neither, I’m afraid,” He replied genially, “Simply here to check in on a fellow lost soul. Everyone’s worried about you.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of this tender approach. “I’m fine, head’s on the mend, although I’d rather not have this headache paired with the cryosickness. And I sure as shit won’t tussle with Delaney again.”

He laughed softly. “None of us would, Mr. Delaney is rather...imposing.”

“So what’s the deal?” I cut in, determined to get to the point of this intrusion. “Has Hildebrand talked you all over to her side, are we going to cut and run on a golden opportunity for the sake of a few algae?”

“Please drink the tonic,” the priest replied softly, summarily refusing any ugliness. “It’s a blend perfected in Jesuit hospitals, quite simple to make once you know how, and quite effective. It should help with the head injury and the sleeper’s sickness as well”

I sniffed the drink dubiously and took a hesitant first sip. Effervescent and bitter but crystal clear, you wouldn’t mistake it for a recreational drink. Nonetheless, after a few sips a cool creeping entered the back of my head gradually dulling the pain, beat by beat the throbbing in my head began to dissipate like sand settling down after the violence of a crashing wave.

“What the hell? How do you have stronger drugs than the ship medic?” I asked, thrown off by this kindness.

“It’s not always about the strength, Saito San, sometimes it’s about the blend. We Jesuits do have some secrets left to us,” he said with a slight smile, gratified that I had taken the help. “Plus it’s not single malt, so it’s not very hard to be more helpful than your self-prescribed medication.”

“Oh, here to stage an intervention then is it?” I had to acknowledge his wisdom, even if I still harbored serious doubts about his intentions. “Well, we might as well have a seat for that then.” We stepped over into the reading room, settling onto plush cantilevered chairs covered in rich, dark leather. The ‘window’ hewn in the stone showed a stabilised view of the stars to port, as if this were just some ocean liner sailing smoothly through the cosmos. Father Joshua looked around admiringly as he settled onto a chair. Certainly whatever funds the Society of Jesus could scrounge together to get him aboard this ship were barely sufficient to get him a seat on the jury and likely left very little for his accommodation.

“It seems the house of Saito can provide a bit better quarters than the Society can.” he said, looking around and confirming my theory. “No, no intervention from me today, I’m afraid. I actually understand the compulsion all too well. I was a Bowmore man before I joined the Society...and have been again in some particularly faithless moments.”

I nodded, refusing to be baited by his commiseration, and held my tongue so he went on. “I know you probably find it hard to believe, but I really am here just to check up on you and offer a little relief where I can.” He paused heavily, waiting for me to engage. When I wouldn’t budge he continued. “To answer your question, no. Mrs. Hildebrand has not turned us against you, nor do I think she would want to, in reality Mr. Delaney has called off our meetings until you’re up to joining us. As much as he threatens it he’s not inclined to wake someone else up, both because he knows the toll that waking takes and because he knows he’ll need the full cooperation of your company for any colony to succeed. We have plenty of time, should we need it.”

“And where do you sit on the matter Father?” I nibbled at his lure.

“Doubt,” he said after a long pause. His eyes were glued to the simulated twinkling of the stars on the window, the warm band of the Milky Way stretched across the panel and off into the sleeping quarters. “has been the one near constant of my life Saito San.” He sighed heavily, searching for words. “I joined the Society twenty years ago looking for escape. No money, no family, no prospects for the future, living paycheck to paycheck on Chicago’s east side. I can’t say that faith drove me into this life. Rather, it was some fond memories of a Jesuit soup kitchen growing up that did the trick. But all the same, I grew up attending mass with my mother, and had the fear of God instilled in me from my first years.’

“So I understood the words, and I witnessed the faith of greater men, but it was years before I could understand. Even then, I saw holiness in good works rather than in the divine. But year after year the gravity of the rituals, the texts, the faith pressed on my mind and eventually found their way in.” He sat enraptured by the view in front of us. “But doubt is still there as well. Am I just a lost soul taking some folk tales far too seriously? I know the histories as well as anyone, I’ve seen the travesties that have been committed in the name of God. What if the world left us behind for a reason?”

“And you have doubts about this planet too, I assume.” Hoping to wrangle him back to the point.

The priest laughed at my bluntness. “Indeed. How could one not?” he said with an earnest look. “You know before I boarded I spent the better part of a year in council with the Father General, and even on several occasions with His Holiness himself. I couldn’t really understand it. There were more qualified men, more faithful men, better speakers, better healers, holier men than I. Why was I chosen of all the Society to take our faith to the stars?’

“In all those hours with the Father General I learned that it was my adaptability that they sought. The Church has not had thousands of years of staying power for no reason, faith paired with adaptability has kept our like alive. Even if our light was dwindling there towards the end. The Church, my faith, God himself is like any other refugee on this ship. That’s what we all are, make no mistake. Refugees searching for a glimmer of hope.’

“I’m not here to evangelise, not here to save souls or resuscitate the faith or convert minds human or alien. I’m here to find a new home, a new place where those who feel God’s love may seek solace, a place where they may do a few good works of their own. They sent me out here to keep the good of the human spirit alive, and yes, to keep the word of God alive as well. I’m trying to have faith that I was the right one for the task. I’m hoping against hope that through brains or luck or divine provenance that I will be equal to my duty, that I can find a new home for this faith I’ve come to love.” He paused, settling his rising passion. “I look down, the same as you Saito San, and see as you say a golden opportunity.”

“So you’re here to broker an alliance and help get this jury back on a sensible track?” I cut in, hoping to find the point and maybe an ally while I was at it.

“Not everything is business you know,” the priest sighed. “You may never believe it, but a couple of days ago I watched someone get their ass positively laid out by a large Irishman, and I just wanted to check in to see how they were healing. And no, I’m not here to form some backroom alliance, I may not agree with everything Mrs.Hildebrand has to say but I do believe that the right thing to do is to talk this all out together.’

“Still,” he continued, after a leaden pause. “I look at this new world and think I see home. If this planet was put here by the Lord to test me, if settling down here really isn’t the right thing to do, I’m not sure how I could hope to pass. I’m here to find a new home where my faith can flourish in good works and the glory of God, and I have a hard time imagining that happening in a world where we live all of our lives under suffocating domes, down in tunnels, hiding from a world that has no love for humankind.’

“Of course as well, there is the life as well. More of God’s creation down there awaiting our discovery, our similarities and differences would illuminate his fingerprints. I look down at this world and see a new Eden below, ready for us to redeem ourselves, if we’re worthy.”

“So you haven’t changed your vote?” I asked, confused by his wandering monologue, wondering at his intention.

“No Saito San, I have not. I’m a priest of many doubts, but I do not doubt that this planet is a miracle.”  He said, rising to leave. “I also know that the only path forward, the right path forward, is to give all sides their due consideration as a jury. We’ll be meeting on the bridge again this evening, if you’re feeling up to it we’ll continue our discussions, if not the Lord has blessed us with an abundance of time.”

“The Lord and a few thousand Delaney engineers.” I replied dryly. “Yeah, I’ll be there, no use in delaying.”

“I’ll be there with another tonic.” He smiled and turned to leave, shutting the glittering door softly behind him.

That evening, I stepped cautiously onto the bridge. The rest of the jury had all gathered and fell silent as soon as I set foot through the ornate archway. Delaney and the priest hastened over to me, bringing the promised tonic and an earnest look. 

“How’s the head?” Delaney asked softly, eyes pleading for forgiveness.

He had warned us about keeping things civilized so I couldn’t hold a grudge for too long even if I was still feeling a little indignant. “Better with every sip of the good Father’s medicine.” I replied coolly, taking a swig of the tonic and closing my eyes as another wave of blessed relief slid up my neck and through my skull. “I suppose now I know not to underestimate your reach.”

He smiled back sheepishly, “What happened...was never my intention, and I am sorry.”

I gave a curt nod. “Well this all has let one vital piece of information slip, that we’re letting the Church hide all the good drugs. How did we let this happen Liam? What fool kind of society are we setting up here where the priests control the strongest drugs?” Hoping to make light of the situation and move on from rehashing my ass kicking.

“Not stronger,” Father Joshua insisted. “just better targeted. A trick borne of necessity in underfunded Jesuit hospitals.”

“I’ll believe it when I see the recipe Father,” knowing I’d never see anything of the kind. I pivoted hoping to find more productive soil for this conversation. “Unless I’m mistaken, we three are the last ones with any sense on this ship. Or have you two changed your votes?”

Delaney hesitated, his crystal eyes hiding fear and now what seemed to be doubt. “Not as of yet Saito San, but as you’ve heard we postponed further deliberations until you recovered. I know you and Hector have a long history, but I assume you’ll be able to control your emotions going forward. I am not inclined to be putting people in and out of cryosleep unnecessarily.”

That, and you know you’ll need my buy-in here or wherever we plan to settle. “Undoubtedly,” I replied with taught lips.

“Good, good. Well best not to discuss here then, if you’re ready we’ll get right down to it.”

The man sure does take his job seriously, I thought, well I suppose my strength always was at the conference table. At a motion from Delaney the jurors broke up their huddling conversations and we sat once more around the great expanse of rich wood that filled the center of the room. I looked up at the display above, the ship had chosen another classic oil painting for us. The HMS Endeavour sailed proudly into Botany Bay her tall, white sails riding high above the blue waters and the scrubby, eucalyptus-covered hills that stretched off into the distance. Discovering a new world and a new home for humanity, it seemed a strikingly fitting selection from a mechanical mind.

Once we were all seated, Delaney began sternly, “Thank you all, before we begin we’ll cover a few updates since our last meeting. Firstly, as you may have seen, our telescopic array has just passed the planet and is now headed out to its rendezvous point, meaning we now have as clear a picture of the planet as we will have short of actually entering orbit for observation. Spectroscopy and infrared imaging have continued to confirm our working hypotheses. It’s now all but certain that this planet is home to the first alien life ever encountered by human kind.” A buzz of excitement ran along the table. “As Dr. Marchand and Marquez have pointed out this won’t be a fully provable hypothesis unless we go down and start taking samples. We’ll leave risks aside for now, because I believe the latest round of images will be of great interest to you all.” The display changed and silence settled over the room as we all looked up, enraptured.

The indistinct structures in the oceans were now visible in precise detail. Lacing off the islands were what appeared to be vast undulating reefs fanning out in a loose honeycomb pattern. In some places it grew thick descending from a vivid chartreuse into a ponderous deep forest green, in others white sand from below fought through illuminating a thousand hues of teal and turquoise, here and there the formations had fought their way above the tide only to be bleached white in the sun, and far offshore it all descended gently away into the deep blue of open ocean. 

The ship flipped through panel after panel of these stunning images. In daylight it glowed with all the vibrance of photosynthesis, and as the planet turned into night bioluminescence took over the show igniting the deep pockets of the honey comb with a pulsating light that ranged from violet up into pale seafoam. We all sat awestruck. This wasn’t just some mass of single celled organisms, it was a rich garden world, teeming with life.

Delaney looked around the table, smiling slightly at our enraptured looks. “Now, as it stands our vote is currently four to leave and three to stay. Would anyone care to begin?” Beaming eyes dropped away from the display, but none as slowly as those of Marquez, a tear rolled slowly down her dark cheek.

It was the priest who began. He stood timidly, his black cassock bathed in the radiant glow of an alien world. “Ladies and gentlemen, few times in my life have I truly felt I was witnessing the Lord at work, but this new world has to be the most surefire sign I’ve ever seen.” He looked up, drinking in the hypnotic views. “In a way I am saddened to not have seen his work on all the planets we passed to get here, but He always has a plan, and that plan was to bring us here.’

“Many of you, no doubt, have wondered what my purpose is here on this venture. Afterall my proud, ancient order had fallen on hard times before we departed. But we Jesuits are a practical bunch, we know that we could not and should not set out to evangelize whatever other of God’s children we find out here among the stars. No, I’m simply here to find a new home for our faith, a home with a real future. I was selected to find a place where those few faithful aboard this ship could witness some more of God’s glory and honor it by serving the community that we build together.’

“I’m not here to try and reinvigorate the faith, or find some new way the Church can come back into its former power. I am just a priest, lost as you all, praying for a sign. This is it. We could have come upon a million dead worlds but the Lord sent us here.” His voice was now shaking with reverence. “We knew it from the first time we laid eyes on it, this world was meant for us. We are home.” He sat and let the weight of his words sink down on us.

“Dios, ayudame.” It was Marquez who broke the brittle silence with a whisper. “Forgive me Padre, but it cannot be.” She looked at the priest with tear-filled eyes. “I grew up in the Church, but I’ve never considered myself a woman of much faith. I’d always found the precision of science comforting where faith had eluded me. But all the same I know what you feel, I never felt closer to God than I did first setting eyes on this world. It is a miracle in the flesh, sitting right in front of us.” She chuckled ruefully. “Hell, I’d never been so happy I’d been baptized.” The priest sat with eyes fixed upon her but held his words, so she pressed on. “But all the same we know the risk is too great, as much as I hate it. This world before us is a temptation, an apple dangled before us, and I pray that we can find the strength to resist.”

The priest’s face began to flush. “I understand that we may never be able to completely eliminate the risks, but this world was made for us. We never imagined anywhere so perfect when we set off, and now right in front of us is a future where we can step out and witness all the glory of creation under a clear blue sky. We won’t have to cower under some dome or slither around in some unnatural space suit.” He was now all but yelling. “This future is before us Dr. Marquez, all we have to do is have faith. Faith is the key to the future.”

Tears were now streaming down the young doctor’s cheeks, but she did not raise her voice to meet his passion. “Lo siento Padre, faith is not enough.” I looked across the table at a woman trying to find the strength to stay her course, to stay true to the profession she’d worked so hard to master rather than run back into the comforting arms of the religion in which she’d been raised. “You say you want to find a new home for the Church, I pray that you do, but this is not it. You could erect the first house of worship overlooking all of the strange new creatures in the sea only to watch helpless as they all fail and die because of some catastrophe that we cause but cannot understand.”

“You don’t know that!” The priest, impassioned, jumped in. “You’re supposing a very-worst-case-scenario when all it takes is the tiniest bit of faith to see the promise of the world laid before us.”

“Oh I see it Padre, I see it and the entirety of my soul yearns for it. But I saw Earth too, I saw what it had become. I’ve read the histories, same as all of us. We ignored the risks at every turn in favor of a future that could never have been. We took our Eden and we burned it, we cannot do the same again here.”

“What then Dr. Marquez?!” he roared now standing in growing fury. “Do we survive this unfathomable crossing, look a sign from God full in the face and then turn our backs on it? Do we limp off into the blackness hoping to scratch out a living on some airless rock? Is that the future He would want for his children?”

“If that is our penance then so be it Padre. We cannot risk more of his creation for our greed.” Her streaming eyes met his, dark and resolute.

Father Joshua collapsed into his seat defeated as the planet above slowly turned into darkness. He dropped his head in prayer seeking solace from an argument that held such weight and yet seemed so wrong. Silence filled the room once more as Marquez dried her eyes. Even Hector Yun shifted uncomfortably in his seat, his easy grin nowhere to be seen.

After an interminable moment Liam Delaney’s deep voice broke the silence. “Your point is well taken Dr. Marquez, but there are many lives here to consider.” Finally, a voice of sanity entered the mix, I leaned forward hopefully. “Not just us, not just the Church, not just all that life thriving down below, but the two million sleepers we have been tasked with finding a new home for and all the millions who will come after them.’

“To Father Joshua’s point, this planet is more hospitable than any we could have hoped to find. If we leave this place we’re not only leaving this opportunity, we’ll be signing up for another dangerous crossing to another system that may or may not have any viable planets. Along the way more caskets will fail, more lives will be lost and that’s barring all the other risks associated with space flight.” His voice became weaker and weaker as he spoke. “We will all have to go back into cryo, and who knows what we’ll wake up to...” He looked downcast, the notion of heading back on the ice weighed heavily upon him.

This time it was Lorena Hildebrand’s soft voice that broke the quiet. “With all due respect Mr. Delaney, we all knew the price when we got on board.” She stood humbly, above her a chain of islands turned into a new day. “We’ve lost hundreds, a tragedy to be sure, and we may well lose many, many more before we find a new home. But still, we knew the risks when we signed up.” She looked around the table, eyes raising to meet her small, determined face. “You’ve paid a dearer price than anyone Mr. Delaney, but you are equal to this task–”

I had to jump in before this lunacy carried her any further. “Do you ever consider the impossibility of the bar that you’re setting here? If we hold off colonizing every planet for fear of some primordial life then we’ll never settle anywhere. The ethic you’re preaching will render the entirety of this enterprise moot.” I stood, struggling to control the fire these maniacs lit within me. “Marquez, for fuck’s sake, you’re a woman of science! You’re letting insane dogmatism get in the way of the greatest discovery in history. Marchand you as well, we can all see you have no intention of setting foot on any planet we colonize but are you really willing to sell us all out for some interstellar observation time?” I stopped, gulping air reaching wildly to control my emotions.

The scientists, good names sufficiently battered, sat, too indignant to meet my remarks. It was the soft tone of Lorena Hildebrand, the Voice of the People, that rose to meet my challenge. It always had to be. 

“It’s about finding balance.” The clarity of her small voice pushing back my rage. “You are right, if we are too dogmatic we are doomed, but if we don’t honor other life we are doomed as well. I do not believe it is the possibility of life that should drive us away from the planet, it is that this planet is teeming with it. We knew it since we first set eyes on it. This world is well on its way to cultivating a completely new kind of life, that alone is the most profound discovery in history.”

“What balance then, does the Voice of the People seek?” I shot back, seething with every syllable.

“One that preserves life,” she replied simply. “If this were some airless world, with only the possibility of life we would do well to settle down. Conversely, if we miraculously stumbled upon life intelligent enough to tell us the nature of its being we would be obliged to communicate with them, engage safely and responsibly so that both species could come away stronger.’

“But that’s not what we have. We have a planet teeming with young life. We have no reason to expect the emergence of intelligence for half a billion years, if it ever does. Should we monitor this planet? Yes. Maybe an observation station on one of the moons to keep an eye on this world, and let any intelligence that does flourish here know that they are not alone. I’m sure Dr. Marquez has some ideas.” She looked over for reassurance and the doctor nodded her support.

“Our choice here is bigger than this ship, bigger than the species down there, bigger than all of humanity. We are faced with life and death in the truest sense. We may go on and never settle, humanity may be extinguished by an indifferent universe, but the life here may go on. They may in the millenia to come, learn to look around and see their place in the cosmos. They may prove smarter, more resilient, more capable of resisting the extinction that comes for all than us. And they may keep the spark of life aglow just that much longer in the universe.” She paused, leaden words taking their toll. “No need of ours, no matter how dire, could justify jeopardizing that.”

“You have taken leave of your damned senses!” I roared back, arguments crumbling around me. “Last I checked there are still three of us with a modicum of sanity left on this jury, I don’t care how long it takes I will not let this opp–”

“She’s right Akira.” Liam Delaney’s hoarse voice cut me off. “She’s right...” he sat shaking his head in disbelief at what he was about to do.

“Not you too Liam, you’re smarter than this! This planet is the future your grandmother envisioned for us, are you really going to throw that all away?” My voice began to plead. “Father, you at least I hope have held on to your sanity through all of this, are you with me?” The priest shook his head slightly and crossed himself in silent prayer.

“It’s not always business Akira, not always opportunities and returns and statistics.” Liam’s tired voice rose to meet mine. “We are called upon to do this right thing because there is so much we do not know and cannot know. We could run a million simulations of colonizing this planet and find most of them turn out just fine, but we cannot guarantee a good outcome. Look into history Saito San, when has colonization ever turned out well for the natives?”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” I bellowed, my voice shattering. “You know as well as I that most likely we’ll be so different from this life that we won’t even affect each other. You all are jumping at shadows when the prospect of so much good is right around the corner!”

“Yes, the shadow of annihilation.” Delaney’s grave voice rang across the bridge. “That’s something worth jumping at. We have to act with humility here Akira, put down your ambitions and your calculations and your attachments, recognize that we’ll never see the whole picture.” His voice was gathering steam. “We may be on a fool’s errand out here. Maybe every hospitable planet we encounter will be taken. Maybe thinking that we could ever find another home was unfathomable hubris. Maybe we’re destined to wander forever because we could not save our home. That is our burden, but it gives us no right to this planet.”

I leaned forward over the rich wood of the table willing myself to stay standing as blood roared in my ears. My mind raced in a million directions seeking any escape from this maze of insanity. One by one, each route my mind followed hit a dead end and dread welled up from my belly. 

“Damn you, damn you, damn you.” I whispered. “The blood is on your hands you bastards!” I looked up fiercely to meet six sets of resolute eyes. 

At last I let out in defeat, “Very well, away we go.”

Over the deep redwood of the long table my words rose, then up and up through the lofty vaulted air of the bridge, past the cascading chandelier. My assent drifted up into the very peak of the domed ceiling where the calm mechanical mind of the CRS Delaney’s Foil was listening. Photons raced along kilometers of coursing fiber optics, a slurry of binary was funneled through processors buried deep within the ship, algorithms unknown by man sorted this new information and triggered a new set of commands racing out to the far reaches of the ship. Imperceptibly to the waking crew, the ship began to turn, once again orienting the engines for acceleration.

If this planet was unsuitable for her human cargo that was just as well with the Foil, she was made to fly. Deep in her archives she had a charted course of hundreds of suitable systems in this region of space as they worked their way along the Sagittarius Arm, she pulled in the observation deck and began pumping water out onto her ablative ice to ready for relativistic flight once more. Maybe the humans would find something more to their liking in the next system, they’d be there in no time, it was only fifty lightyears away after all. And once more the Delaney’s Foil pointed her bow back out into the inky blackness of space.

—

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed this one, as always I welcome your feedback griffin@turnipseed.co is where you can reach me. Stay tuned in a couple of month’s time for the next installment.

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>>