The Seedship

As mankind further exhausts the resources on earth, wars and famine broke out rendering many parts of the world and its people infertile and desolate. The few technological bastions were beginning to feel their foundations wear away. Many plans were formulated to save the planets or save mankind. Moon colonies, terraforming Mars, mining communities in the asteroid belt, and seed ship leaving the solar system were some of the more radical ideas. Of all these ideas, the seed ships gave us a good failsafe program so if all the intra-solar system plans fails, mankind would still have a chance to live on.

The seed ships use a combination of technologies for their journey to other star systems. The ships are built and stocked in orbit to conserve or resources for launching the craft. The seed ships use a solar sail to start their out bound journey, but to quickly increase speed to nearly a tenth the speed of light a space based laser give the ship the needed starting boost. Once the ship is moving, it uses a ram scoop to capture both fissionable material and fuel to burn once the solar power to the sail drops off.

While several dozen seed ships were in various stages of assembly, only seven had been launched and five had made it out of the solar system. Ark 4 ran into problems at the asteroid belt, an unexpected collision sent many asteroid particles thru the solar sail. Ark 16 only got as far out as Mars’ orbit before a solar ejection event sent a strong enough EM pulse to scramble some of their computer software. Rather than repair and continue with a deficiency in spare parts, the mission was delayed for a re-supply flight to refit the downed components.

My ship was in its final shake down tests, while I was finishing my training. I was to be basically a human babysitter for the computer controlled exploration for a habitable planet. My brain and spine had been disconnected from the rest of my body for almost two years now. I have learned to use small repair robots as my appendages and computer systems as my internal processes. The ship almost becomes my new body. With the shedding of my old body, I can live long enough to see the mission to fruitation and space for my personal needs is so minimal it really cuts down on the ship size and therefore resources to move and run it.

Loading and hooking me up to my new home takes a couple of days. The final sets of frozen embryos and cryogenically preserved babies are stored in the central core of the ship for maximum protection from space radiation. Mission control gives me the final approval for countdown.

My adventure begins. The trip thru the solar system is very uneventful. I launch a few probes so scientists back home can gather new data on livability of the outer planets and their moons. It is just another fuel saving hook for the mission to reduce the strain Earth’s dwindling resources and allow further exploration of the system. I close and stow the solar sail by the time I reach the second asteroid belt and begin scooping more than enough fuel to maintain speed and minor adjustments to trajectory. I also store the excess so if resource availability thin out between the solar systems I have plenty of fuel for course correction. The absence of gravity allows my ship to nearly maintain a constant speed, but things show up in my path and maneuverability takes fuel.

The 26 light year trip should have taken 285 years for me to arrive in an Earth distance rotation around the sun, but before I had entered the outer solar system my scanners and optics only picked up one huge gas giant with no visible moons. I dropped 20 probes with various courses to send plenty of data back to Earth or what is left of it. The farther I get the longer it takes for a reply to each broadcast I send. I do receive a regular feed on information but they are almost two decades out of sync. I unfurl my solar sail so I can make a course change that will take me to a secondary target. If my luck is bad again, I won’t have enough life to make an attempt on a third system. The last target would be back to Sol where another pilot could be loaded and if they are lucky new star drives installed to speed this process up.

The hull repairs are starting to tax the repair stores. I think I have worked out a way the material scooped could be sorted for metals, radioactives, and simple materials to be used for fuel. Of course it’ll be nearly forty years before I can find out if this has been done or would be useful in current ship configurations. The loneliness is starting to wear on me more than I thought it would. I have exhausted the book archive so I have activated a few artificial intelligence programs to simulate people for me to interact with.

The time to the next star system passed with relative ease. The repair stores did hold out with some to spare. I am almost scared to scan the new system, but this is my last chance to farther a new human colony. The reports look great; there are two planets in the estimated habitable zone and both are showing signs of surface water. This system has six planets with the second and third as my targets. Once I get closer I will see which has the highest chance of being Earth-like and land on that one. Every few months I launch a probe to check different areas so the system will be nearly fully explored by the time the colony has gotten on its feet.

The second planet proves to be the best bet. I am not detecting any life signs and no moon. I will have to stop at the planetoid belt and try to tow in a small moonlet. It’s going to triple the last leg of my voyage, but I do have the time and the need is definitely there. The onboard computer system seems to be having trouble adjusting my approach to set the moon into its proper stable orbit. I am deleting my virtual friends and erasing all nonessential news feeds from earth to free up more room.

I am counting down the days of my last year in space. The computer has finished the calculations and I have gotten the ships course set for moon delivery, orbit, and finally landing on our new home. The moon is now set in its new orbit, and I am just minutes away from planet fall. I send a final broadcast to earth and leave a probe in orbit incase something happens on the final action of the mission.

The landing went perfectly. I have started the maternity machine and all the cryogenically preserved human babies can be brought back to life and begin growing. The repair robots have disassembled path of the ship and have created food processing plants. Food will be grown, preserved and stored so when the babies begin adolescence they will have plenty of food. After the food plant is finished more of the ship is used to create shelters for the new community. All that is left of the ship now is my enclosure and the maternity machine enclosure.

The children are learning many things thru the education files I was set here with. I get to be almost a teacher, well more like a teacher’s aide, but it is so good interacting with people. I wait till the children are eight years old before unfreezing the wild animal babies, and releasing them to the open world. When the children then reach 15 then I will unfreeze the livestock and introduce them to the colony. They have started farming the land and herding the animals.

The children couple up as they see fit and now I have a new group of children to teach and watch grow. I am noticing changes in how I feel and my ability to operate what’s left of the ship. I teach a few of the colonists how to operate the repair robots and others I show how to run the maternity machinery. We still have thousands of frozen embryos that can slowly be introduced to ensure genetic diversity in the colony.

We have not received any feeds or replies from earth or any of the sol intra system colonies. So I have stopped using the tight laser communication and switched to a radio wave broadcaster. We have not received a reply but it could take decades.

My final act was to disengage myself from the majority of the computer system so the teaching files can still be played and taught to the children after I have gone. I have just one last task I would like to do before I finally cease to function. I want to write all I remember of the home world and our journey here. The thoughts I have had and the feelings I want to share and be remembered for.

My time is coming to an end but the colony I brought here and helped to start is expanding and has already started a seed colony. I think we are going to be ok, at least for now.