The Ship of the Unforgotten - Meanwhile, on New Eden...

Rojet Mayet sat back in his high-backed chair and rubbed his temples. The day had been long and hard, though that was hardly anything new. His life had become so complicated since that council session all those months ago. The Rose Dawn project had complicated his life immensely, though of course that was entirely his own fault, and indeed he’d planned for it. That didn’t mean there weren’t days that he regretted it.

He’d spent countless hours debating the priorities of the project with various heads of state around the colony. So many fools and their petty-minded fears. He couldn’t comprehend how they got through their lives with such limited perspective on the world.

He could only imagine how much worse it would be if anyone actually knew the extent of his plans for the First Ship, as so many liked to call it. He shuddered. As far as anyone outside his facility knew, the ship had been the victim of prototype technology errors, the crew dead for centuries as their mobile tomb carried them faithfully across the stars. They had no idea that he had had his teams develop and launch an AI module to hijack the computer and kill the still-living crew of the ship in their long sleep.

He felt true remorse over that necessity. He wasn’t a monster, no matter what others might have thought of him had they known. The sad fact was that New Eden couldn’t sustain the population it already had, and that a paltry 30,000. People were starving in the streets of some provinces already. Add another 3,000 newcomers and a tense, ugly situation was only going to get far worse. The First Colonists could not be allowed to make landfall at New Eden. They just couldn’t. But no matter how bad things were out there, the other councilors would never accept that.

By now it was academic, of course. The AI module had long since been launched and would already have done the first of the jobs he had set for it, the elimination of all of the UTS Rose Dawn’s crew and colonists. The second job it had to perform was simply to allow the ship to continue on its way as originally planned, and then to adjust course to enter orbit around the world and ensure that his boarding crews had no trouble relieving the ship of the precious cargoes it carried; the fresh stocks of viable soils, waters, and many and varied biological specimens. He was particularly curious about those last. When the UTS Eden River had arrived here and founded New Eden before Rose Dawn had even left their home solar system, it had come with what had seemed at the time to be plenty of supplies.

If only, he thought, FTL travel had worked more like it had been depicted in science fiction programs. A quick flash of the drives and poof, there you were at your destination, no problem. Sadly, reality didn’t work quite that conveniently. The UTS Eden River had been capable of FTL flight, but only five times the speed of light. Her original crew had had to fly frozen too, because while they made the trip far faster than Rose Dawn had, it still took them a century to do it.

For quite some time, it was true that they had enough supplies, but only until it became clear just how hostile the planet truly was to terrestrial life. They could survive there, but only with great difficulty; they had immense difficulty in converting local regolith into new, viable soil for growing crops and other plants, which in turn limited—or should have limited—the population growth of both the human population and other animals and livestock.

Rose Dawn, though … now there was a unique opportunity. She had flown here the slow way, and he could not wait to board her personally and investigate what exactly had happened to her population of flora and fauna in the centuries she’d spent crossing space. Her colonists and crew may have been suspended, but for the animals aboard her, the ship was what had popularly been called a generation ship. He knew from the records that one early proposal for the Rose Dawn mission had been for the people aboard her to remain awake and to reproduce along the way, leaving their distant descendants to colonize New Eden. That plan had even informed some of the ship’s design elements. The development of safe, reliable cryo-technology had made it unnecessary though, and the generation ship concept was adapted so as to spare the crew the expected psychological problems of living out the rest of their lives in containment.

And so only the flora and fauna had remained “awake” for the trip. Survival of centuries in an artificial environment with relatively complete ecosystems would have placed enormous survival stress on the entire population. After centuries, it was a certainty that a lot of adaptation would have occurred, though it was hard to say how extensive such adaptations would have to have been. His dearest hope was that there would be some changes, most likely in the bacterial populations of the ship, that would offer the scientists of New Eden new ways to cope with their hostile home. The hardiness required for survival in the ship-that-was-a-bottle might be of some benefit on the planet below.

He sighed. And the other idiot councilors couldn’t see past the soils themselves. That was their idea of a prize to be gained from the ship. He wasn’t blind to its value, of course, but even if it would effectively double their supply of soil, the potential riches living in that soil were so much greater! And some among them argued against keeping it. Blind fools. Their sentimentality would have them direct the ship into the sun, thinking it disrespectful to rob the dead.

He had his staffers subtly spreading other messages to counteract such foolishness. They talked often and openly of the nobility of the First Colonists and how it would be dishonoring them not to make use of the bounty they had left behind for the benefit of the colony they had believed in so strongly and worked so hard for. He planned memorials and tributes to them, and in the next breath had shuttles standing by, ready to transport everything off the ship that could be taken. In time, he’d have even the ship herself broken up and brought down for her resources. Maybe some of the less valuable pieces—the bridge perhaps—could be saved intact. The children might like a museum to remember the historical curiosity, after all.

His thoughts were broken up by a sudden commotion outside the office door. Voices were raised, and then without warning, the door flew open. Savid Ohgman, a vid reporter he recognized all too readily, burst into his presence. Following immediately after him were a full rec crew; head-mounted cameras turned to him, their wearers bearing witness to what was about to transpire.

“Councilor Mayet! News just broke that your people here in the university have been working behind the back of the council to sabotage the arrival of the First Colonists, that they are, or were, still alive, and that you planned to murder them so you could keep their ship for study! What is your response to these charges?”

He fought against visibly allowing his jaw to go slack. “What? This is preposterous, what are you doing in here, spewing this nonsense at me? Get out of here, all of you.” His mind whirled. His security was good, what could have allowed this to happen?

“We have schematics for an AI-housing built into an old planetary probe, councilor! We also have some damning audio clips. Would you care to respond to those directly? I’ll play them for you—”

He set his face into an expression of grim implacability. Heads were going to roll over this. He just hoped none of them were his.

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 15

Cobb left the room behind the others and paced as much as one can in near-zero g, swearing under his breath. How had he let things get so out of control? He was the ranking officer in charge, and he’d done little more than take up space since he’d found them, letting them guide his every move.

Granted, he’d been in rough shape after waking up. He’d been so terribly weak, and his whole body felt dry, like he’d been out in the desert for weeks without water and somehow he’d remained alive to suffer it. It had taken a small eternity for the pod to rehydrate him to the point where he could move his tongue enough to call for help.

The computer had answered—the traitorous, compromised computer, he reminded himself—but her only autonomous unit was engaged elsewhere and would require time to get to him, she’d said. She hadn’t been kidding about that, he’d been trapped there for hours, waiting, unable to free himself. He’d gotten just far enough to see the pods around him and to recognize the significance of all the red lights.

He paced another few minutes, lost in the image of the lights. He hadn’t been able to see the contents of the pods, but he hadn’t had to. He’d felt the lifeless eyes staring at him through the frosted canopies, weighing on him, pushing him back into a coldness deeper than the freezing of the cryo-suspension.

He shook himself, feeling the intense cold all over again, banishing the eyes of the dead. He sighed, rubbing at his own eyes. He suddenly felt every year that it’d been since he’d last had a coffee, or a stiff drink. The time weighed on his skin, in it, like an itch that couldn’t be scratched.

Maybe that was when he should’ve known, he thought; when he’d felt those eyes. Maybe she did it on purpose. Left him there in that tomb of a cryo-bay. Dawn Rose was a computer, she had databases and crap, he knew. She, or whatever was in control now, must’ve accessed his personnel file, seen his personal history. Read about how his wife had died. How it was his fault she’d died, and how he’d become a wrecked shell of a man for years afterward.

She left him in that room of the dead to break him, he knew. He was fairly sure that she’d at least partially succeeded.

He smirked. They were trying to break him, too. The others, Chambers and Jackson and that coward, Pixton. Well, it wasn’t like they were exactly the cream of the crop. Not if they believed that crap about outside influence. They’d have to do better than that to get under his skin.

He looked back at the hatch. Snatches of the conversation within surfaced in his memory, and he snorted. Hakware from an external source? The whole point of the trip had been to go somewhere new, somewhere uninhabited. No, there was no external force at work here. Whatever had hijacked the computer had been aboard the whole time. That was a troubling thought. Was the computer just faulty, malfunctioning? Or was something else going on?

His eyes narrowed. What did he really know about the others? Pixton seemed to be pretty obvious. She was a coward, plain and simple, only comfortable in her computer world. But the others had all been awake before him. He only had their word that they’d been awake a few days.

He would have to watch them. Carefully.

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 14, Pt. 2

“Is it possible we’re not the first to awaken?” Dann said, thinking aloud.

Rose started to speak and then stopped herself. “I … can’t be sure. It’s hard to imagine anyone else woke up successfully and accomplished something like this without being detected.”

“I’m sure that’s not it,” Pixton said in the distracted voice of someone deeply focused on something else entirely. “They’d have left some trace in the system, and there’s nothing like that here. This is definitely from an external source. And … if what I’m seeing is right … I really do mean external.”

“What do you mean?” Cobb snapped. “There’s nothing out there.”

“I mean there has to be something out there, whatever’s causing this didn’t appear out of thin air!”

“There’s nothing out there!” Cobb shouted. “We’ve come billions of kilometers for nothing! We haven’t even arrived yet and everybody’s dead! There’s no life for us out there! There’s no hope for us out there! There’s no colony out there! There’s nothing!”

Pixton just stared at him, mouth agape, face pale. He was trembling with anger, staring hard at her, then whirled and stalked to the far side of the room. He stood there, back to the rest of them, visibly trying to calm himself. The rest of them stood mutely, staring.

“Well. Pixton, why don’t you find out everything you can there,” Dann said, glancing at Cobb. He was shaken; the other man had looked like he was close to coming to blows, and over what? Dann had no idea. He’s taking it all pretty hard. And honestly, I can’t blame him, he thought.

Pixton nodded shakily and turned back to her pad. Jackson appeared beside him. “What was that?” she asked.

Dann resisted the urge to glance over at Cobb. “Nerves, I guess? I doubt any of us are in our best state of mind.”

“Yeah well, flying off the handle like that isn’t going to help anyone.” She threw Cobb a glare across the room; his back was still turned. “I don’t like where Pixton’s investigation is going any more than he does, but if she’s right, we have enough problems without him going crazy on us.”

Dann grimaced. She was right, but what could he do about it? Cobb was the senior officer in charge.

“Lt. Cobb has seemed a bit unstable for the last few hours,” Rose said quietly. “At least if I’m in any position to judge anything.”

“No, I think you’re right on the money Rose,” Dann said. “Is there anything we can do about it?”

“Try not to antagonize him,” the android replied.

Dann was about to open his mouth to retort when—

“Huh,” Pixton said, staring at her screen.

“Huh?” Dann replied, his train of thought derailed. “What is it?”

“Um … I just got into the navigational data. It looks like we’re very close to the colony site.” Cobb, his attention drawn, rejoined them.

Dann narrowed his eyes. “That’s not a surprise. We were supposed to be awakened at that point. But, I could’ve sworn I heard a ‘but’ at the end of that sentence.”

“Um … yeah. The planet looks … inhabited.”

“That’s completely ridiculous.” Cobb growled. “We’re the first ship out here. It must be rock formations.”

“N-no, sir,” she said. “R-rock formations don’t have l-lights, sir.”

“This is nonsense,” he said, and stalked out. “We lost our crew and you’re chasing phantom colonies!” he yelled, slamming the hatch behind him.

“It really is true!” she said to the others, calming considerably once Cobb was gone. “Check this out.”

She moved her fingers over the tab, adjusting the data flowing to the screens around the room. The floating image of the ship flickered and reformed into an image of the half of the planet visible to the ship’s on-board optics. The optics were the best that could be packed onto a ship the size of the Rose Dawn, which made for some pretty impressive imaging.

They were in the outer reaches of the solar system, a few months away from the planet, but they were able to get astoundingly clear views of the surface. Clear enough to accurately map the very visible roads and buildings and walls and domes that clustered in several town- or city-like groupings on one of the visible continents. They could even make out what looked to be vehicles moving along them.

Dann felt his stomach dropping within him. “What…? How is that possible?” he asked, as Jackson gasped. “That’s not … it couldn’t be alien, could it?”

“I don’t think so, not if it’s the source of whatever hakware’s attacking Rose Dawn,” Pixton replied. “It’s using known protocols to get into our systems, and no alien civilization would have those.”

“But then where the hell did they come from?” Jackson demanded. The three of them stared wordlessly at the display, watching the dots of vehicles sliding over the complex of roads on the world that should have been theirs.

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Jenny Pixton, Full

Jenny grew up largely ensconced within the comforting embrace of ebooks and the Internet. Of course there was a family and friends and a physical location and all of that, but when she thinks of her past, she thinks of digital vistas that transported her to worlds beyond imagining, to lands of make believe and adventure and wonder and terror far more than she thinks of school and homework and parks and vacations.

She was never more than an average student, at best. The most common complaint her teachers had about her was her lack of focus, which was never entirely accurate; she had focus in spades. She simply spent it on parts of her life outside of school, except when school interested her. Mostly that meant that she did really well in any class that had anything to do with computers. She sometimes took some interest in math and programming, though that was later in her school career.

Truth be told, most of her education had nothing to do with her teachers. She often barely noticed them. She learned most of what she needed online, and school provided little more than a place for her to sit, a power source for her tab, and direction for what to dig into. She took those directions mostly as suggestions rather than as requirements.

For all her various teachers’ hand-wringing about it, she turned that experience into a healthy career in computer security by the time she hit her late teens. She was good enough that she had her pick of several offers; she went with a military posting as a civilian contractor because the pay was good, it seemed less likely that she’d have to bother with a lot of meetings, and most importantly, it seemed like the most challenging by far. So she was wrong about the meetings; two out of three ain’t bad.

Challenge became a serious driving force for her, and was the reason she volunteered to leave Earth behind. Her younger self could hardly have conceived of such a notion; cut herself off from the Internet and the vast riches of knowledge and entertainment it possessed? ON PURPOSE? But by the time the opportunity arose, she was fed up with the mismanagement that was rampant on the Internet, and realized that if she did go to a new world, she could be responsible for the creation of an Internet that, by its very architecture, could not be politically mismanaged. One that was truly open and accessible, the way every geek and nerd raged that the Earth-bound internet should have always been.

By the time she was done working through those possibilities, she couldn’t imagine NOT going. She began to feel like, if she didn’t go, someone else would set up another internet, and of course they’d get it wrong. It’d be just like the one here on Earth, and suffer the same problems and the same failures. She couldn’t let that happen.

Of course she knew she wasn’t the one that was actually in charge, but she still felt that by being there, she could have a positive impact, could really contribute in some major way to help the new network avoid the problems of the past. And so in the end, there really was no choice for her. She couldn’t conceive of not going.

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Lydia Jackson, Full

Lydia Jackson was an army brat, her parents both in the military. The moved around a lot from base to base while she and her siblings were growing up.

She was rough-and-tumble, kind of a tomboy her whole life, and she never had any trouble handling guys that got too hands-on with her when she blossomed into a beauty. With two older brothers she’d been fighting with her whole life, boyfriends and wanna-be boyfriends were no problem at all.

That didn’t mean her judgement was always the greatest when it came to guys, though. She dated her fair share, and maybe one or two more, and always they ended up being jerks somehow. Maybe it was her attraction to the bad boy type, or just poor luck of the draw, but whether she left them or they left her, it never ended well.

She never let it worry her too bad. She’d find the one eventually, she figured, or she wouldn’t. Either way she had things to do besides stress over what she couldn’t change.

One time she’d been sure she’d found the one. He was kind and considerate, but still bad-ass enough to kick ass when the time came. They were together almost a year when she found she was pregnant. He didn’t take the news well. He showed his true colors by vanishing the next morning without a word. She tried to track him down, but never did find him, the bastard.

She named her little girl Lila, and Lila became her world. A world with a heavy financial burden for a young single mom, but still her world.

She made her parents proud when she enlisted, following their examples, and her brothers’ too. She adjusted very well to military life. She could follow orders to the letter, even when she didn’t like it, and impressed every commander she had.

She was offered the chance to join the Dawn Rose project. She explained that she couldn’t possibly accept it, she had a daughter to raise. She’d thought the matter was settled for several weeks when her superiors came back to her and explained that she was made of the right stuff they were looking for, and that if getting her on board meant taking her daughter too, well, her daughter would just have to go.

Lydia accepted the offer after talking it over with her family. They weren’t excited to lose her, of course, nor their granddaughter, but their family would live on two worlds. That was nothing to scoff at.

Lydia accepted, determined to build the best new world possible for Lila, her world.

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Frederick Cobb, Full

Fred Cobb was barely married—he and his blushing bride were just back from their honeymoon—when tragedy struck.

They were fairly well-to-do; not rich, but not hurting, at least. They lived in a two storey split-level house in a suburban neighborhood. Maybe not the high-class neighborhood with the best school, but still the sort of place you could feel good about, a nice neighborhood. Friendly neighbors, visible police patrols now and then, no graffiti or vandalism to speak of. Sure, maybe the neighborhood kids would get rowdy now and then, and the older ones might drink some times, but nothing unusual.

Not until the night Fred went on a late-night walk to the corner store to get his wife some ice cream.

He’d left the security system disabled, the door unlocked. He figured he’d only be gone a few minutes. Maybe 10, tops. He was back in 5.

Within those 5 minutes, someone slipped in. Someone found his wife, waiting in the bedroom, reading one of her murder mysteries. Someone shot her down.

He came back before the guy got away. He was riffling through the room, collecting her jewelry and loose cash when Fred, alerted by the open door, charged into the room. He shot Fred twice, both shots striking his arm, and fled on foot.

Fred blamed himself, even when nobody else held it against him. Even her family, horrified and devastated as they were, kept repeating that there was nothing he could’ve done, that it could have happened to anyone, anywhere. He couldn’t make himself believe it though.

His life shattered out from under him, Fred began drinking heavily. He was a black pit of depression who barely managed to hide it on the job; he’d been a construction foreman back then. It was inevitable though that something would slip eventually, and when it happened, one of the men under him paid the price.

A poorly-welded I-beam escaped his attention during an inspection, and it snapped under wind-stress on a build site. When it snapped free, it landed on one of his men, shattering the guy’s leg bad enough that it’d never fully heal. It left him crippled.

He lost his job after that, and the pit of his depression deepened. His sense of himself was lost. His confidence in his judgment was lost. His drinking got worse. He couldn’t find work, was at risk of ending up on the street. It was looking pretty bad until finally his family—his whole family, his own and his wife’s—came to him in an intervention.

Her father was retired, but had been in the military, a career officer his whole life. He offered to pull some strings, get him a posting that would ensure he wouldn’t lose the house, help him get set up again. If he gave up the bottle, and if he did well enough, he could even eventually see about getting him a recommendation for officer’s training.

Fred pulled himself up after that. He took the offer seriously, and he lived up to it. He started to gradually flourish again in the military, and never touched a bottle again, much as he still felt the need for it. His father-in-law came through, and he was recommended for officer training. He excelled. He could never forget the past, and never wanted to, but he started to learn that you could keep on living and that part of living was learning to be positive about things again.

He was starting to climb the ranks again, was gunning for lieutenant, when he learned of the Rose Dawn mission. He thought nothing of it at first, but the idea was planted in him. Slowly it began to take over his thoughts; the ultimate reboot of his life. The perfect way to start something new, to get it right, to put everything he’d learned to the test, to finally heal the massive break in his psyche that he’d suffered.

His family was surprisingly supportive of his decision. They weren’t happy, but they agreed with him; they thought it was the best thing for him, and a fitting way to honor his lost love’s memory by building a whole new world.

When he was accepted into the program, he was an optimistic man, looking toward a bright future.