Weekly Drabble #234: A Day in Darkness (Patreon)

With 'a light in the infinite dark' from LystAiP, we return for a literal and figurative interpretation of that phrase to humanity's, last, best and only hope for continued survival. Enjoy!

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A Day in Darkness:

“Good morning, Commander,” Hope says as you wake up, touching your feet to the deck. It’s pleasantly warm. Despite the state of the war, no expense was spared on humanity’s last gasp for survival. Practically, it made sense. Hope was going to be out in the void for decades, likely even centuries before it dared stop running and even begin searching for a new home. The comfort of its caretaker crew would be paramount. Cynically, all of humanity not aboard the vast colony ship was on the cusp of annihilation. What else would that money and time have gone to that meant a damn?

Urban renewal, planetary infrastructure, health care, veteran’s affairs, architecture, the arts – all of that would be wiped away when the Purge descended. Nothing had mattered but Hope. You sigh softly to yourself as you climb out of bed. “Literally and figuratively,” you say to yourself.

The AI’s response was prompt. Most human AIs required direct prompting for interaction, but Hope was the most complex neural net ever built. She’d always been a little different, even more so since she’d woken you from cryosleep.  “Commander?”

“Nothing,” you reply. “Confirm my schedule and download to my command link.”

“Checking,” Hope replies. “Confirmed. Download complete. No priority messages. Would you like a review of the non-priority messages?”There were a lot of ideas about what to name the ship’s AI; Mother, Nurse, Protector, Guardian. In the end, all of them had come back down to the same name as the vessel, the same thing that this expedition meant. Hope. For you, for the crew, for the hundreds of thousands of refugees still in cryosleep and for humanity itself. Hope that you weren’t sure if you believed in more these days than when you’d launched. Not with a Sword of Damocles hanging over your neck.

“No, I’ll check them myself.” You get up and shower and dress. After that, it’s breakfast in the officers’ mess. You nod to Lieutenant Commanders Caspian and Donahue. Lieutenant Meng is just leaving. Hope has a small caretaker crew; less than a thousand for humanity’s largest starship and it’s easy to know most everyone. There’s no bridge duty today; Lieutenant Commander Vasimir is handling that. Your job is the bimonthly ship circuit, checking in with all the departments first-hand. Many first officers would handle this from their offices, either calling in the department heads for a meeting or setting up a commlink for a virtual conference, but you prefer it this way. There’s still a lot of work to do and this keeps the disruption to their sections to a minimum. Likewise, it’s a more personal touch.

You vetted every one of these men and women, just like you and Captain Mueller were vetted by the Oversight Committee. Hope is the last remnants of humanity. Only the best and brightest, those with the most promise and those with the most value, were allowed to serve here. At least, mostly. Genius tacticians and decorated combat officers had been left behind so that they could slow the Purge long enough for Hope to escape, but the winnowing of the selectees hadn’t been limited just to the caretaker crew.

The first stop is Medical One. There’s not much to report. A handful of minor injuries, one serious – a rating working in one of the cargo bays had broken her back when the gravity plating had abruptly fluctuated and the material in the bay had shifted. She’d been crushed between the bulkhead and one of the groundcrawlers. Once she stabilized, she’d be outfitted with an exoskeleton as a temporary fix. Repairing damage to the spine was still tricky, even in this day and age. She’d be off for a few weeks, light duty for the next few months until the doctors said she was fit again. That meant her coworkers would have to pick up the slack.

It wasn’t even her fault; the fluctuation in the gravity plating was yet more damage from going through Eris’s wormhole. Hope had never been designed for something like that. The gravimetric shear and radiation pulses had done a number on the vessel. Almost any other human ship would have been destroyed outright. You’d survived, though.

Eris, of course, had suffered barely a scratch. Minor structural degradation to her outer hull, long since repaired. Even the smallest of the machine race could survive anything that didn’t immediately kill them, healing themselves like living tissues responding to damage. There had been a message, classified at the highest levels. It had come from one of the farthest-ranging scout fleets, the armadas Earth had hurled into the void in the desperate hope of finding something they could use, or an ally they could find to stand against the Purge. None of those teams ever returned. In two instances, the scout fleets’ final transmissions confirmed what Command already suspected: all of them were hunted down and destroyed.

Nothing of what they’d found had been useful, most of it demoralizing. Dead civilizations, murdered worlds. A testament to hundreds of thousands of years of genocide as the Purge swept through the galaxy, leaving extinction behind them. The message though – the last one Scout Armada 793 ever sent – was badly garbled and fragmented by the distance. Little of it was intelligible, but an image had been recovered. A corpse, dozens of kilometers long. A Despoiler-class Purge warship, just like Eris. It had been broken in half by an impact of incalculable power. Someone, somewhere had managed to kill one of the Purge’s most powerful vessels.

It might not have done them any good, but it had proven that humanity’s foe were not unbeatable. Sadly, nothing else had been learned from that incident. The armada went dark after that; most likely hunted down just as their counterparts were and without complete, uncorrupted navigational data for their location, Command couldn’t spare the ships or resources to go looking. That message was still in Hope’s database. Not that you could do anything with that; that discovery was fifteen million light-years away and fifteen million years in the past, but it meant that there was a chance.

“A chance,”Captain Mueller had told you all. “If someone did it once, then it can be done again. We just have to find someone like them in M83. That’s our chance.” Unless, of course, there wasn’t anyone like them in the Southern Pinwheel. Unless, of course, Eris got to them first.

After Medical One, you check in on the science labs. Nothing much to report here. Hydroponics and airponics are progressing nicely. You’ll be able to stave off starvation for a while, but Hope still needs replenishment. That brings you to the quartermaster’s offices for an update on the supply situation. After that, it’s main engineering. Deck after deck, using elevators, ladders, stairwells and tram cars to move around. Finally, the last stop of the day.

You swipe your security card over the door reader, then letting it sample your palm-print and retinal patterns for verification, stepping through first set of doors. They close behind you and a decontamination mist fills the room. No chances are taken here. When you step out, your skin burns a little and there is a slight chemical odour that clings to your clothes and will be with you until your next shower. Next up is the security checkpoint. The guards there double-check your ID and finally let you through. You step out onto a huge walkway that bisects a vast chamber, branching off into smaller avenues and boulevards, ramps and stairwells. Heavy cargo elevators rumble softly on their exposed rails. Maintenance and medical drones whirr through the air above, below and all around you. This is the first of Hope’s four primary cryogenics bays.

The air is cold and everything is bathed in cool white light from high-definition glow panels. Row upon row stasis tubes fill the room, connected to vast columns or embedded with the bulkheads. Inside each of them is one of Hope’s most precious cargo, the five hundred thousand last souls of Earth. You head down the walkway – they call this the Thoroughfare, but on schematics it’s dispassionately referred to as Primary Passage B1-C1. Five levels here in Bay 1, each of them with twenty-five thousand sleeping souls and three more bays just like this one.

You walk by dozens of placid, sleeping faces, men and women alike. There’s hardly anyone past middle age here and those that are, are all together in a specialized section up in Bay Three. Cryosleep can be hard on a body, and the Oversight Committee wanted to maximize the chances of survival.

Cold, dispassionate logic. The potential and prospect of so many lives narrowed down to lines on a page. What could they do for you? Brilliant men and women were left behind, their age and health making them unsuitable for long-term cryosleep and the rigours of rebuilding a civilization. Children had been weighed based on their family history, their genetics and their potential. The only exceptions made were those whose knowledge was deemed worth the risk of bringing them, despite the dangers or those who had some other intrinsic value that earned them a position here when none of the twenty-three billion others had.

Every colonist taken meant someone else was left behind. Fifty-one men and women, and two purpose-built AI for, the Oversight Committee had met behind closed doors, their identities kept secret and all record of their decisions had been destroyed once Hope was populated. In order to reduce the chance of bias, none of them nor their families were allowed a place on Hope.Occasionally, a name would leak. That person would be inundated with pleas and demands. Bribery was pointless; what could any of them spend money on with the Purge closing in? Threats, likewise had had no bite. Dead now, or dead in a year’s time. That didn’t stop people from trying, offering everything they owned to get themselves or their loved ones onto Hope, or trying intimidation out of desperation.

The Oversight Committee refused to be swayed. The fatalistic nature of their work demanded nothing else and slowly but steadily, Hope was filled. It could have carried three times as many passengers, but that space had been taken by backups and replacement parts for the stasis systems. These were the largest cryogenic suspension facilities ever conceived. There could be no risk of failure. At least, widespread failure.

Projections suggested that, depending on the length of the journey, ten to forty percent of Hope’s passengers would die in coldsleep. Eight hundred and seventeen had already done so, most of those during and after the vessel’s unexpected trip through a wormhole. Eight hundred and seventeen hand-picked choices, each of them intended to be catalysts for humanity’s rebirth. Scientists, artists, visionaries, builders. Examples of vital genetic diversity and unusual human phenotypes. All of them were represented here and if you didn’t awaken them, one by one, they would all die. Not today, not tomorrow or even in a decade. But the longer Hope took to find a home, the more of them would never live to see it.

You’re lucky, you’ve been told, that that number is so low.

You stop at your usual point in front of a particular stasis tube. There’s a young woman inside; too young to have accomplished much, but she is one of the finest examples of a phenotype from a particular population from the Indian sub-continent, with vivid green eyes. That alone wasn’t enough to qualify her; Hope is filled with genetic samples and frozen fertilized embryos, but the results of a battery of tests and analysis pushed her over the edge. She was deemed intelligent, cooperative, psychologically flexible, healthy and of breeding age. An asset to humanity’s survival. The cold equations at work.

The staff call her Lucky, and she is. Even more so than being chosen. She’s nearly died five times, but each time the drones and the medical staff were able to save her. She had to be pulled out of her tube twice, but she’s been kept sedated each time. You’re only supposed to awaken the passengers in dire emergencies. Bringing them out of stasis isn’t just risky, but it can also be psychologically taxing to the person. Especially if they don’t want to go back under.

Five times she’s almost died, but five times she beat the odds. Six, if you count her presence here. Seven, if you count the Heretics’ intervention. You visit Lucky every time you come down here, just to check on her. She’s a fighter. The best example of the human drive to live, no matter what. The one who keeps beating the odds. It’s an odd thing, you know. You’ve never met this girl and will probably never speak to her in real life, but knowing she’s here makes you feel a little better. Despite all that’s happened and how close she’s come to death, she hasn’t given up. Humanity hasn’t given up.

One foot ahead of the other, one day after another.

You touch your hand to the cold, clear window on her stasis tube. “Keep up the good work,” you say to her softly.

After that, you move on to your meeting. The day’s not over yet, and there’s still a lot of work to be done.