This is Two Zero Seven Actual.
So. Background.
We've been building the Generation Starship for two hundred
and fifty years, ever since Earth was bullseyed by the comet Scripture-Horace
3175 - we just called it the Big One. I'm not talking about a slap on the
planet's surface and a few years of nuclear winter. I'm talking about the
planet getting cracked open and everything on the surface being wiped out. More
than nine billion people dead in an hour, with virtually no warning.
Nine billion. We could have died out as a species.
There were still several million people out in space,
working and living and supplying an on-it's-last-legs Earth with what it needed
to survive. Bases on the moon, asteroid mining stations, orbital habitats,
colonies on Mars, the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, and interplanetary ships as
big as cities, carrying thousands of people in relative safety.
So, what do you do? The homeworld is gone and we can't live
in space forever. So, the geniuses of the solar system had a look at some
extra-solar planets and chose one that seemed the best candidate for possible
habitation. They perfected genetic modifications in case we need to be
physically changed for new worlds, increased immune systems, all kinds of stuff
I can't even begin to understand. I'm an engineer, in charge of an entire fleet
of support ships called the Two-Zero-Seven fleet.... at least, I used to be.
Anyway, after they developed these genetic changes they then
needed a ship, a vessel big enough to get the human race from one star to
another. So the Generation Starship, the GS Salvation, was designed and
built, and with engines powerful enough to get it up to one-quarter lightspeed
they calculated they could get to the star they had chosen within one hundred
years. That's about four generations, so the original crewmembers - probably
even my son who is only eight right now - would be dead by the time they got
there but it'd be their children who continued the work, land on the planet and
make it a new home.
That's more than twenty million people to be put on a ship
and sent out into the galaxy. So, the whole human race spent the next couple of
hundred years building the GS Salvation.
You should have seen it. I hope you have seen it, or will
see it. Forty miles across, three miles deep with multiple levels, great
swathes of farmland and even mountains, and pushed along by a singularity
engine the size of a mountain range; an engine that gave them power, gravity,
propulsion, everything. It was, quite simply, a man-made planet. Well, perhaps
not a planet - imagine a huge mushroom flying along flat-head first, with the stalk
pushing it along. Not a pretty analogy, and it's a bit bigger than a mushroom.
The entire solar system was focused on this project. Every
colony, settlement, station and ship was employed to gather resources,
transport equipment, build and build and build... everything was about the GS Salvation.
There was nothing that wasn't done that benefited the ship that would save us.
We sent the pioneers out in smaller versions of the GS with
the new engine, only about half a mile to a mile in size, to travel to the
closer stars to see what they could find, perhaps even find a planet closer to
home. Some never came back, some did. Hundreds of ships went out but that
single star with the planet of promise, four hundred light years away, was
always our best chance.
I came on board as soon as I hit my fifteenth birthday, and
worked with my mother as an engineer. She was in charge of the famous
Six-Seven-Nine work fleet, she was the Actual, and it was her skill that got
the singularity engine working to peak efficiency. When she died I inherited
the fleet but since it had been created by my family bloodline to specifically
install and test the engine, once it was finished there was little left to do.
So, I had to disband the fleet and I created the smaller Two-Zero-Seven, and I
became the Actual. We were responsible for ferrying the high-level technology
and personnel on board at Pluto Launch, and we got a great reputation.
It was in the last few years of preparation that I met my
wife and we had a son.
But I can't talk about that right now.
So, the ship was ready. The human race was aboard. We had
genetic samples of every living creature for cloning, we had embryos safely
tucked away, and the great flat world we had built, with a city and towns and
farms and parks, and even an artificial sun and moon, was finished and ready to
go. As a bloodline family we had our own house just outside of Earthtown, and
had been given permission to have another child if we could. Perfect.
Yes, perfect. It's like those holodramas, when everything is
great and the good-looking guy just got married, and you know he's going to die
or his new wife is going to bite it. Melodrama. We love it.
Melodrama can fuck off.
We're a few hours from launch and there's parties and
laserworks going off all over. We're leaving nobody behind, except, perhaps,
for the few crazies that want to stay. There's nothing left, we've stripped as
many resources as we can and the human race is leaving this dying, rotting
solar system. And good riddance - nobody on that ship had ever felt what it's
like to walk on a world, feel a real breeze or rain on the face, know what it's
like to see sky and clouds, or feel sunlight that hadn't been screened by
radiation shielding or energy fields. We had all been born in space and there
wasn't a single human being that remembered the Earth as it was.
It's then I get the call from Launch Control that a feedpipe
from the ship to the Charon support base hasn't disconnected properly.
Brilliant. I'm not going to ask one of my (now very drunk) staff to do it, so I
kiss my wife and son goodbye - and, thankfully, I told them both that I loved
them - I get into my J-Class All-Purpose Support Shuttle and fly down to have a
look. Sure enough, an old feedpipe that was sending power and resources to the
station before it went self-contained hadn't come loose - to be fair, it had
been connected like an umbilical cord to the GS for more than a hundred and
fifty years - and I had to laser off the house-sized clamps to get it free, as
well as drain it to be sure it didn't pose a threat. That meant flying into the
crater to the base of the pipe and sealing the feed before disconnecting the
pipe at the GS. We didn't want any residual resources spraying over our brand
new ship and potentially damaging it just before launch, so I had to close it
off at this end and then bleed off any excess to make sure the feedpipe was
empty, before going back to the GS and removing the pipe from there. An hour's
work, easy.
So easy, I get it done in half an hour. I call it in and fly
out of the crater.
And the GS Salvation is gone.
