Crysalis: Merrill's Tale

Mining the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter had been a long-desired goal of humanity. Imagine a massive series of rocky chunks in sizes ranging from small moons to large pebbles, each riddled and seamed with one or more valuable ores, and all just floating along, waiting to be ravaged by whoever got there first. This, naturally, set everyone to drooling at the prospect. Problems ensued. There had been some early attempts, most failures of varying degrees of abjectness. Then Dr. Fred Azimuth, an engineer with Dubiously Dynamic Dynamics on Terra, asked Professor Evelyn Germaine Pizzaro, an astrophysicist born on Luna and visiting D-Cubed for a job interview, out for coffee. The rest was history. The pair of geniuses devised, over coffee and pastries and almost as an afterthought, the drive which made exploring not only the Sol system but the Milky Way galaxy possible: the Azimuth-Pizarro Drive aka the A-P Drive Naturally every company and every country on Terra, Luna and Mars got into the act. But the A-P Drive made it possible not to waste time by sending mining concerns all the way out to the Belt, to rip harmless asteroids to pieces then ship the useful bits back towards Sol. How inefficient! The Drive went one better: in effect, it brought the mountain to Mohammed. A scout ship detected a useful asteroid, set down on it, installed an A-P Drive, do a little down-and-dirty programing of the auto-pilot, then resume searching. The crew could be back on-board sipping tea while the aforementioned asteroid went into a braking spiral as it left the Belt and after a while fall into a neat parking orbit half a million miles or so beyond Mars, Terra or Luna. Then the mining crews could gut the rocks to their heart’s content, and not spend months getting there and back again. Heavy metals. Radioactive ores. It was a happy time for anyone who had money invested. The ravaged, swiss-cheesy bits of rock had their A-P Drive uninstalled. Not long afterwards, one blew a rather large crater into the far side of Luna, so the brains began doing what they did best: brainstorm. The A-P Drive could be installed in anything, in essence turning whatever it was into an interstellar ship. Why waste time puttering around the dinky little solar system when we had the Milky Way and all the endless galaxies beyond? Thus, the fleet or, as it was often referred to with obvious caps, the Fleet. A baker’s dozen of the used-up asteroids were retrofitted into an armada of generation ships to explore the galaxy-with-a-capital-G. With such soul-stirring names as the Marathon, the Intrepid, the Invincible, and the Boldly Go, the Fleet was envisioned as the perfect way to seed the billions of suitable systems with humanity, spreading the genome like a fungus across the stars. The first four shot off in opposite directions towards the closest stars, rapidly escaped communication range, and in short order disappeared from all human knowledge. Others were commissioned, and each departure was accompanied by stirring speeches full of high-sounding rhetoric and bright hopes. Everyone with any sort of useful knowledge or suitable genetic structure was encouraged to volunteer, and many accepted the challenge. After all, Terra was almost worn out, Mars was filling up, and Luna was fast approaching a swiss-cheese state herself. Titan and Europa were cold and damp. Io was heading towards her own hole-ridden state.   Why not take the chance to find a new, fresh, warm planet? After the ninth ship left, some began to feel that there wasn’t much left of the highest quality, human-genome-wise, in the entire Sol system. Ships ten through twelve ended up being little more than prison ships, galactic Botany Bays used to get rid of whoever had offended the powers most recently. Then came the Tredecim, the thirteenth and last of the generation ships. Naturally, the inhabitants decided to call her the Tred-13. Not so much a ship as a conglomeration of the misfits, the outcasts, the restless, the malcontents, the martyrs, the antisocial, the eccentrics, and the just plain leftovers. Some wanted to go; some didn’t. Under a crew somewhat less than stellar, the ship set off towards Tau Ceti, at a rough distance of seventy light years. At ten percent light speed, the average cruising speed of the A-P Drive, the trip would last somewhere between seven hundred years and the end of time. But a lot can happen in seven hundred years to people living in the pressure cooker of an enclosed environment. Ideas and technology are lost and reborn and sometimes changed out of all recognition. Entire cultures grow, mutate, separate, rejoin…and die. Back on Earth, the behavioral scientists had recognized this inherent danger in the very beginning. They knew the difficult years for people spending their entire lives without ever seeing or knowing anything but the ship itself—and with tongues firmly in cheek, they called this period the New Middle Ages. This expanse of time could change the inhabitants of the Tredecim in ways only dimly perceivable. The behaviorists shared their concerns with the geneticists. And geneticists, being only human themselves and thus in love with tinkering, made some slight adjustments...many of which would only kick in centuries in the future… What follows is only one of the stories of the epic journey of Tredecim…