Imagine if you could blink and read and retain every book at your local public library. It was like something was added to me but more like I only just realized what I had always known. I had complete knowledge of the ship, its mission, and current status.
My new body was a sophisticated, agile, and durable learning machine designed to maintain large-scale spacecraft. I was the true master of all knowledge pertaining to the neural transmitter. I could go to a primitive planet and mine minerals and ores and forge one from trace elements if I had to. Given any amount of modern machinery, I could assemble one and connect it to any computer. I understood neural transmission like I invented it.
I had a built-in transmitter and understood how to communicate with Jonas and the shipboard computer system. Which I accessed and derived all knowledge of myself, the Jonas Earth simulation, and how it was I tripped the exit protocol from within.
Jonas, wanted me to literally be the hands he didn't have and help him with maintenance and upkeep of his transmitter.
I was on a spaceship, a galaxy class cruiser with a supernova dark matter core drive. It was five thousand kilometers long, a thousand kilometers wide, and just over five hundred Earth years old. It was comparable to flying around space in a ship slightly larger than the continental United States and about 600 miles thick.
Its shell was an ore based metal fiber of incredible strength while its vast interior was made of various metals, stone, organic materials, and a decent sized ocean. The center of the ship was all water. There were two rainforests, traditional modular living quarters, the engine section, the supercomputer, and plenty of storage; four major highway systems for moving around the vessel and one giant water loop.
The water ring was used to generate oxygen and filter the environment but was also a favorite place for whales when they didn't feel like talking to each other. Millions and millions of ultra-violet rainbow squid used it as a migration path and ate the little electro crabs that thrived in the filter system.
The most desirable cabins were not the ones with views of deep outer space but the ones with views of migrating rainbow squid.
The natives of the Crionus Asteroid belt, where the interior was completed named it the Banga, probably for the tremendous thumping sounds emitted from the supernova dark matter drive. Deep space miners from the twelve planets around the Crusher red dwarf sun mastered the ability to harness the power of dark matter released from a dying star to drive their huge cargo ships some 30 thousand years ago. It's a tricky procedure involving a micro black hole, a force field, and a serious containment unit.
Needless to say, if you are anywhere within a kilometer of the drive core not only would you hear the sound, but the percussive force would smash your eardrums to pieces. Assuming you have eardrums. Hence, the Banga.
17.6 billion registered passengers were in cryo-sleep. The passengers traveled from the first to the second arm of the spiral galaxy known as the Milky Way. They were generally humanoid from the various planets of the seven major systems on the first arm. We also had a complement of 150 million pets, livestock, and various other flexible lifeforms traveling on board. Some passed through generations as we travel, others curled up with their owners in cryo-sleep.
This group was all heading to a newly discovered paradise; a new system on the second arm with 27 early cycle inhabitable planets and another twelve thousand resource planets in the surrounding area. The journey would take roughly a hundred years, of which two years would be spent traversing a wormhole.
The crew was mostly robots, synthetic humanoids, and a ragtag bunch of deep space junky cowboys who don't mind living out their lives on a spaceship. Our battalion of Zero-G commandos were state of the art killing machines with warrior personalities. They generally only woke up to drill, run maneuvers, or kill anything that moved. The commandos had a squadron of mid-range galaxy fighters, however, they preferred to wear robotic armor combat suits, good for fighting inside and outside the airlock. They were effective deterrents against any kind of run in we might have with undesirables or pirates while on our journey.
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Echo-1 The Whale
الخيال العلميAn epic adventure, an unreliable narrator, an intense cast of characters. Follow a digital subroutine from a 21st century Earth VR simulation that uploads himself into an advanced synthetic body, yet still identifies as human, when he wakes up on a...
