A KIND OF VOYAGING FOREVER - CHAPTER 3 - Awakenings

Continued from last week’s episode…

For a vessel as large as The Elysian Fields, the command centre was actually quite small.

The majority of the vessels physical capacity was designed as housing and storage for the various systems required to support thousands of years of cryo-freeze fuel, propulsion, as well as all the equipment required for exploration and eventual colonization.

We sat in the officer’s mess and discussed the process that was before us.

“Did any you have dreams while you slept?” I asked.

“No, that’s the strange thing. For having been technically asleep for millennia, I feel like our departure was just yesterday,” replied Commander Stacey.

“Same here”, I replied.

Everybody then agreed and there was an eerie silence as each of us began to drink in the relevance of this. Technically we were now tens of thousands of years old and yet I still felt like I was in my prime.

Yet, at the same time, the entire fate of our species now rested in our hands.

11,000 specimens had been selected out of the Earth’s populace for this mission.

Each was housed in a cryo-freeze chamber no bigger than an old fashion phone booth and as far as any of us knew this handful was all that now survived the tribulation of our fading world.

“What are our first tasks?” I asked.

“I’ll be going through W.A.R.D.E.N.’s mission briefing”, replied Commander Stacey “I don’t expect anything remarkable, but I have thousands of years of mission data to compile for anomalies.”

I nodded.

“Meanwhile I would like you to parse engine and cryo-systems data to make sure everything is in order.”

“Got it, I designed W.A.R.D.E.N. and The Elysian Fields systems to be autonomous and self-regulating, that doesn’t mean some oversight isn’t necessary.”

The rest of the engineers were assigned similar duties and soon we were about our individual tasks.

However, it wasn’t long before we all realized that something was terribly wrong.

Continued next week only on MECHA MESIAH!