Pioneers: Part 4

THE COMMONWEALTH - SCORPIO SECTOR - BELLWETHER COLONY - VLADIMIR WATANABE ORBITAL STATION

Voyager 154 was a standard, Ironhorse-class, Commonwealth Colonizer Train-Ship. From stem to stern, she measured 40 kilometers in length, ten of these kilometers were occupied by her drive systems. Arranged around her spine were 44 colony seed pods --- which contained fuel, supplies, and instructions sufficient to begin settlement on alien worlds. These were shaped like tall skinny pyramids with flatted tops and tapered bases. Smaller pods held additional equipment, tools, and processing gear. Also on board Voyager 154 were 968,000 embryonic human beings, 2,200 adult human volunteers and children in stasis, and a crew of 190.

Voyager 154 was designed for a one-way, six decade journey to the far side of the galaxy, the Perseus Quadrant. Following on the heels of the Exploration and survey ships, it would be her job to begin or augment colonies on 22 Terra-class planets. She currently orbited Bellwether colony, a pretty world of dark blue ocean and rust red continents; the nearest world to the Chrysanthemum StarLock.

An entire deck of Voyager 154’s cylindrical operations module was given over to monitoring cargo. Two cargo specialists, Potts and Dirksen, were watching the machines that monitored the colonizer ship’s cargo. It was incredibly boring.

Dirksen was very bland, tall and thin, with dirty blonde hair cut efficiently and unimaginatively. A single thin communication wire extended from his ear to the corner of his mouth. “Confirm pallet Zeta-660 locked into Colony Pod 21. All connects green. Pallet secure.”

“Confirmed and acknowledged,” said a female voice on the other side of the VOX Link. “We are gone, Cargo Control.”

“Go safely,” Dirksen told her. “CC out.”

“I am so bored,” Potts reclined in his couch and stretched.

“In six days this ship leaves for Chyrsanthemum Station,” Dirksen pulled up the navigational plots. “Then, sixty-one-point-five-nine years in hyperspace.”

“That failed to make me not bored,” Potts groaned. Potts, who was short, dark, with unfashionable facial hair, teased his fellow launch technicians to cope with his boredom. He was not popular among the other technicians.

“When the ship is on its way, we go back to ground. I think you would like that,” Dirksen answered.

Potts shrugged. He watched as Dirksen reviewed Voyager 154’s itinerary, the 22 worlds it would be calling on. “You wish you were going?”

Dirksen laughed. “Yea-go, my wives would just love that. Maybe, someday, if the Perseus StarLocks are ever finished.”

“Do you have any of your own going out the?”

“Probably,” Dirksen answered, blushing. He didn’t want to go into detail.

Potts seized on this. “I’ve got hundreds, thousands maybe. I used to give my juice to the In Vitro Project before it was canceled.”

“I am surprised they took it,” Dirksen replied.

Potts reached into the comestibles locker and opened a bottle of Jizz, (a clear, citrus-flavored carbonated beverage with a particularly raw marketing scheme) and took a long drink before continuing. “Kinda like the thought of having all those offspring, living on after me, on the far side of the galaxy. You ever think about how all these little ‘bryos gonna spend the next sixty-five years growing up in a tube… and when they wake up, they think they’re really alive, I mean, they think they’re really alive but it’s all just memories an artificial intelligence programs into them.”

Dirksen was getting bored with the conversation. “It tells them what they need to know, and gives them memories so they don’t go crazy.”

“Phony memories!” Potts insisted, Jizz spraying from his lips. “Artificial memories. Bedtime stories written by androids and told them by robots.”

He leaned across his couch, uncomfortable close to Dirksen. “And what really gets me is, how do we know that everything we think is a memory isn’t just some fake implant to keep us from going insane?”

“Mine are real!” Dirksen insisted. “My mom and dad are still alive. They live in Magnuson. I have two brothers and a sister. We spend every Feast of Alms together. I don’t know about yours.”

“Oh, I got memories… I remember a whole lot I don’t even want to remember.” Potts grinned and tapped the side of a rack. “And every one of these embryons is going to have their head filled with warm, fake, childhood memories scripted by… professional fiction writers Sweetwater pays to write phony childhoods. The ones from the same sperm and egg donor even get fed memories that they grew up as brother and sister. Sometimes, they just buy people’s childhood memories and use those. None of it’s real. They aren’t even real.”

“Who?” Dirksen asked, not sure which “they” Potts meant.

“The embryons. They grow up in a tube and the colony companies program them to do whatever they need done out there. They’re practically no different than robots.”

Dirksen cleaned his nails on his pants leg. Potts moved in still closer. “How do we know that we weren’t made the same way? Or our parents?”

“They only use this program for the far colonies,” Dirksen protested.

“So, they tell us.” Potts displayed the kind of grin that made others want to punch him.“Nobody knows what happens when they reach the other side. For all we know they wake up as deranged cannibals and kill everything in sight.”

“Potts, shut the hell up,” Dirksen said. Pretty much everybody said that to Potts, eventually. As far as Dirksen was concerned, he was real, what he did made him who he was, and that was the end of it.

Potts was quiet for a few moments, and then he said, “How do we know we aren’t artificial memories being programmed into someone else?”