Homeward bound

The year hardly matters, the day matters even less. Even my name is hardly relevant either but if you must know the yellow embroidery on my deep blue overalls says Smith. I’m sure there are hundreds of other Smith’s onboard but for the moment I’m the only one awake. In fact, I’m the only person awake. As I walk through the empty halls the ever-present buzz of the fluorescent bulbs overhead is the only thing that keeps me company. Well, besides the sporadic groaning of the ship around me of course.

On my first shift I’ll confess I spent the month in a constant state of panic. Every creak was the ship breaking apart beneath my feet, every flicker of the pale blue bulbs was a critical electrical failure. Every slight irregularity was doom, I was certain of it. After all, on a ship of a hundred thousand I was the only thing standing between humanity and the cold dead void of space. That first month crawled by but I survived. My reward was a year long nap in my cryo tube. Iced over, body pumped full of a myriad of chemicals meant to suspend both my bodily functions and natural aging. There were eleven others like me. Technicians, that is. We were awake one at a time, each for a month long shift. Any longer than that and we ran the risk losing our sanity. Or so we were warned. Man hadn’t evolved to survive alone in space, so we did what we could to minimize the stress. After all it was a long thousand year journey we had ahead of us.

Something squelched beneath my fork and I looked down. My vacuum sealed dinner that was mostly a viscous abomination referred to as potatoes and gravy sat fairly untouched. My hand found it’s way to the bridge of my nose and pinched, an involuntarily tick of mine. I was only two weeks into my waking stent and I was already disassociating. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for this, maybe a month was too long for my tragically human needs. Companionship, a conversation… eye contact with someone other than my reflection in the ships polished steel hallways.

The technician before me in the shift rotation was my only real social connection. We never got to speak formally as the system wouldn’t wake me up until she was asleep. Still, she had a habit of leaving notes everywhere and honestly I appreciated it. They were always signed Olga with a little happy face. I looked away from my unfinished meal and over at a one such note stuck besides my favorite table in the vast, empty dinning hall. “Keep it together! -Olga =)” was all it said. I sighed and refocused my vision on the neglected meal, sticking the fork into it. “I’m trying Olga.” I muttered. Almost on cue the lights flickered and went out. “I’m really trying”

A few minutes passed in darkness, the emergency lighting kicked on as it had the last few times this happened. The generators had always rattled back on after an automatic reset so I didn’t worry to much. This time that didn’t happen though. I felt the rising pang of anxiety deep in my gut. That sense of imminent doom. Of the thin line between humanity and cold agonizing death growing ever thinner. “Keep it together!” Olga’s scrawled words rang out in my head, with a voice I assumed would be similar to hers. It was heavy with a thick accent, fitting for someone named Olga. I squashed my nerves as I had done so many times during my first rotation. I’d done a dozen by now. Everything would be fine and if it wasn’t then it was my job to fix it. I gave it a few more minutes out of a combination of hope and lethargy before my duty and anxiety compelled me to investigate.

The darkness was unnerving. The emergency lighting didn’t hum the same way as the regular lights and it’s red hue was quite unsettling to say the least. Not to mention that without the ever-present hum of the lights I could hear every creak and groan of the ship. There was a new sound as well, a sporadic pling of outside debris hitting the ships hull. The ship was traveling at incredible speeds, each tiny particulate of rock that struck hit with incredible force, or so the physicists had told me. Anything larger than a speck of sand posed a serious risk to the ships integrity. It’s trajectory took it through the emptiest parts of space but there was no telling what was out there.

That’s why they’d constructed a hundred of these things. Only one needed to make it to humanities new home out among the stars in order for the ARK project to succeed – the hope is that they all would of course. Thought that was very unlikely. The project coordinators had made that very apparent to mission critical staff. They predicted about half would be lost in the journey to mechanical malfunctions or impacts. Fifty million. Poof. Gone. That was considered to be a success. Crazy.

Still, my job was just to get my ship there. The Homeward Bound.

It seems like a tough situation to be sure. A real rough break. I can’t say we didn’t do it to ourselves though. Generations of neglect had left our world inhospitable to human life. By now the last vestiges of humanity on earth were probably huddled unsustainably underground. Whatever survived on the surface would be unrecognizable in a couple thousand years if it evolved fast enough to keep up with the changing ecosystem. The ARK project was the only path forward for humanity. It was a chilling thought and certainly placed a lot of pressure on me as I pumped the handle next to the sturdy bridge doors. With the power out they needed to be charged manually to open and that meant me getting my reps in. A few minutes and one very sore arm later they popped open with a hiss, just enough for me to squeeze through.

Inside the consoles twinkled with a hundred faint status lights in every color of the rainbow. Except for red. That was good, you never wanted to see red. Tossing myself into a chair I rolled over to the console and input my administrative codes. Fingerprints, passwords, four-digit pin. The whole shebang. Opening up the diagnostic I quickly switched over to the generators display. It took a moment for it to register. There was no warning, nothing wrong with them. They hadn’t gone down due to some surge or bad wire. They had gone out and they hadn’t restarted because there wasn’t anything for them to do. No power to convert and distribute.

Slowly my eyes gazed to the side and there it was. A sticky note written in familiar hand was obscuring a small section of the control panel “We can do it =)” it read.

Beneath the note was a small blinking light. A small blinking red light. A small blinking red light above fine lettering that spelled out solar sail. You never wanted to see red, especially not there. “Hold it together” The voice echoed again. “Yeah no shit Olga.” I spat out loud, my voice echoing through the empty bridge. If it wasn’t for her note I’d have seen that light sooner when I did my rounds. I could have fixed it before it became a problem. Now I had about ten hours to rectify this issue before systems started to go off-line. First the back up lights, then climate control, life support and finally about a week down the line the pods themselves would malfunction. Releasing a hundred thousand civilians into a cold lifeless ship.

I couldn’t think about that now though, I was already walking to the observation deck in fact. The solar sail was hard to miss, but first I needed to get the window shields open. Thick bits of metal designed to protect the relatively fragile glass from the deadly hazards of space. I had a solid thirty minutes of manual charging before they finally began to slide open, revealing the vastness of space before me. Infinite stars glittered on the stellar horizon and for a moment I allowed myself to be taken in by the beauty of it all. Which one was supposed to be our new home I wondered? My moment of insignificance in the grand cosmic scheme was brought to a swift end however as my eyes wandered to the solar sail. I was about to be very significant, at least to the lives onboard this ship. Hundreds of holes, no thousands peppered the reflective foil sheet spread out wide before the ship. It was meant to sustain some damage, but it was in tatters. Not only did it power the ship, but it propelled it as well. I’d have to replace it, there was a backup ready to be deployed but it was meant to be secured to the outside of the ship and due to it’s massive size the spare was housed outside the ship.

I hadn’t gone outside yet. I was hoping I would never have to and yet here I was. Thirty minutes later suited up with my hand on the airlock. I still had about eight hours to get that sail deployed and save the ship. Plenty of time. “Keep it together.” I whispered to myself as I threw the airlock open and dragged my suited form out into the void, engaging my mag-boots only once I was entirely clear of the airlock. They stuck to the hull with a reassuring thunk. Behind me the airlock closed silently. Everything was silent in fact besides the shaky rhythm of my own breath. I could feel myself sweating with each step I took. It was a long way to the bow of the ship, after several minutes of walking I took a moment and let my eyes wander. There should have been other ships around, tiny specks on the horizon silhouetted against passing stars, very hard to see perhaps – but they should have been there none the less. The realization that they were not threatened to send me into a mental spiral. Were they all gone, were we the last ones left? I had to remind myself that the sail was gone. We had not been accelerating. The others were still out there, they had just left us behind. We were alone.

I resumed my solitary walk along the hull of the ship, crossing over the large yellow lettering that spelled out the ships hopeful name “Homeward Bound”. A hundred thousand people depended on me doing my job. Now was not the time for the heavy hand of existential dread to set in. There were so many lives bathed in the soft blue light of the cryo-pods inside the very ship beneath my boots. One step, then another until at last I’d made it. Kneeling down I tightened my hand around the grip and pulled hard. It was a long process to disengage the solar sail and to my surprise after the cables were severed the tattered sail didn’t drift away. In fact it kept moving at the same pace as the ship and remained, from my perspective, quite stationary. Logically I’d known that would happen due to the nature of space and it’s general emptiness but it was still surreal to see. The ship and it’s old sail moving in tandem like two dancers on some grand cosmic stage.

It was fine, no worries – I reminded myself that the new sail would push the old one out of the way, sending it fluttering into space where it would almost certainly never be seen again by human eyes. I set about the business of doing just that. Deploying the new sail was a dozen step process with a hundred sub steps. The process had been drilled into me and I was grateful I could do it on mental autopilot despite my nerves. Over the next three hours I kept telling myself that this was the job, that this is why I was here. I was one of twelve trained to keep a hundred thousand alive for a thousand years. One of twelve to get us home.

I was covered in sweat and my muscles ached from the strain of moving in the cumbersome suit. Not even zero-g could make its awkward form effortless to move. Eventually though I found myself making my way to the final release lever. I reached out to grasp it, I saw my fingers stretch. Almost done I thought to myself. I did it. I was already congratulating myself on a job well done as I reached forward and then in an instant it was gone. My hand, my arm. Gone. Space was very much empty, it was one in a billion, one in a trillion chance perhaps that a rock the size of a rice grain would be flying through space in the same place at the same time as me.

It was enough though, the force took my arm and the suit along with it. As shock set in and I felt the undeniable chill of space as my suit set about performing it’s automatic emergency functions. Sealing the breach, preserving my air as it rapidly dwindled. I saw the bar fading, I saw my vitals spiking. I could feel my arm but when I looked towards it there was nothing. Why could I still feel it? There were tiny spheres of blood, freezing in the cold but otherwise nothing. It was gone. My arm was gone.

“Keep it together”

Those words became a chant echoing through my mind, holding back the tides of shock and panic. My missing arm ached despite its absence as my good arm reached down and grasped the lever, wrenching it upwards. The sail shot forth and send it’s former self careening out into space. The light of a thousand distant stars glittered off the replacement. I didn’t even register it, I turned and lurched back towards the airlock. “Keep it together. Keep it together. Keep it together.” With each step darkness closed in and the pain ebbed. I wasn’t going to make it. “Keep it together” The last thing I remembered was reaching for the airlock. Then nothing. Silence, Darkness.

“Keep it together.” The voice echoed, but it sounded different. Not like I’d imagined it would have. The darkness receded. Replaced by a fuzzy blue hue. The silence was gone too. The reassuring buzzing of the lights was back, and I felt strangely warm. My eyes focused on a face before me, one I’d only ever seen through a layer of glass and ice. Olga.

I tried to sit up but she pushed me back down with a steady hand. Then another face joined hers, and another. Soon a handful of people were looking down at me. They were muttering to themselves and I couldn’t seem to make out a word. The confusion in my face must have been apparent. Olga spoke first, her voice was softer and her accent was not quite as thick as I’d expected it to be. “When your vitals spiked the computer woke the eleven of us up. Emergency protocol. The gangs all together for the first time and all it cost you was an arm. Got to keep your legs and everything.” She chuckled for a moment then caught herself. “Sorry, bad joke.” I laid back down, taking in all the faces. It was overwhelming. I’d been part of this team for years and never once spoken to these people and now here they all were. Joy flowed through me. Not because I’d done my job and saved the ship, not even because I had survived.

The loneliness was over, if only for a fleeting second. We had lights, we had power and most importantly – we had each other.

Just twelve souls awake in space.

Twelve people together, homeward bound.