11
May
Update: How does Wednesday sound for Blog Carnival day? And I’d like to get theme suggestions in today, so I can put a poll up for the next carnival (the week after next Wednesday).
This is an idea that sprung to mind this afternoon, and was fleshed out by chatting with a few other authors.
What do writers think of a blog carnival for twitter writers? For those who don’t know what a blog carnival is, this is a great example (just click on any week). Basically, each week a blog would have the privilege of hosting the carnival, and provide links (and usually short excerpts) to all those who submitted articles for the week. This drives traffic to multiple blogs and writers, and allows new writers to get their name out there in a simple manner.
To differentiate this from Friday Flash and Tuesday Serial, I would suggest that each week has a theme (or perhaps two themes) around which the stories are written. This theme would need to be announced a week in advance of the submission date. I believe a poll would be the best method, so that writers may choose that which most interests them.
Stories would be of approximately 1000 words, and can also be submitted for Friday Flash or Tuesday Serial. Good stories deserve as wide an audience as possible.
There would also need to be a coordinator for the blog carnival. Much as I like the idea, I won’t have consistent enough internet access over the summer to serve in the role, so someone else would need to be nominated.
For those interested, please comment here, or send me a message on Twitter. I would like to have 5-10 interested authors before starting this up.
10
May
The next installment in the Jenny serial, where we meet the rescuer.
Of course, things could be looking down. That thing at the cavern mouth was a Devastator. They were legend in the human army, a rumour that even the newest and dumbest recruits new. Devastators were never acknowledged by command, and JNY-35197 had heard enough to piece together why. Every Devastator was a genetically modified criminal, turned into a cyborg, and given enough firepower to level an army. And they were insane. They’d had every remorse stripped away, and killing wired right into the pleasure centres of the brain. This particular one had arms that ended in repeater nests, and a high explosive mortar poked over the right shoulder. Yeah, it might have saved Jenny, but he wasn’t going to hang around. Devastators were notorious for friendly fire.
Command had other ideas. Jenny and the other few survivors tagged along behind the Devastator as it wandered towards an alien juggernaut. The Devastator cocked the sensory nest that replaced its head, and a support leg whirred out from its back, settling into the ground. The mortar rose over the shoulder to point in a straight line at the juggernaut. Oh dear. Not a mortar, a rail cannon. The grunts dove behind rocks as the cannon fired. Electricity belched backwards, charring the ground. One organ replacement screamed. He had been too slow.
The shot smashed through the juggernaut, and was still moving when it punched out the back. The Devastator capered. Jenny felt sick.
He stayed behind the rock. Command ordered Jenny up. He stayed put. Then his suit sent pain into his arm, and command told Jenny to move. Jenny moved. Six humans followed the genetic wreck. Another juggernaut, another rail cannon, another electrical burst. The organ replacements dived for cover.
Jenny felt strange, an observer wandering through Hell. Another Devastator appeared, leading another group of refugee soldiers. He forgot his training, his stealth, his raiding, and wandered dazed behind the Devastator. It wiped out an alien patrol. Aliens were more common now, thicker on the ground. Some of them shot back. The Devastator chittered, and killed. It had been hit, and there was a tiny scratch in the armour. Jenny shuddered. He would have died.
The grunts looked at one another, and hung back. More Devastators appeared, leading organ replacements. Ahead, a mass bulked. Alien dropships. So this was an assault. Why bring the humans? The Devastators were having fun.
A dropship attempted to lift off. Rail cannon pierced it from all around. It fell from the sky, bleeding. Other vessels chose to fire. Devastators were hit, and these weapons hurt. One lost an arm, grinned stupidly, and put a rail cannon into the turret that shot him. Some went down, but not before unleashing torrents of fire. Jenny stood at Hell’s gate.
Jenny and the other survivors hid, looking at one another. What where they were for? Command crackled over the radio. Jenny shouted back. Command insisted, and Jenny crumpled in pain. The grunts stood, weapons out, and prepared to charge. Command is a bitch.
7
May
Here’s the fourth installment of Jenny, as well as my #FridayFlash for the week. For those of you who might be new to this (short) serial, there are links to the other four at the bottom of the post, starting with “The First Day”.
The humans were ready. The ball of ice had been set up as a trap for the aliens, and when their ships flew down, cannon and repeaters open fire, decimating them before they landed. And when the aliens did land, JNY-35197 and the grunts went to work.
Compared to the infiltrator gear of the humans, the aliens stuck out like glowing targets on infrared. Jenny would lead the grunts in, silence any guards, and watch as demo charges and repeater fire wiped out enemy patrols. This worked well. Twice.
The third time, tripwires and electronic screen fields were in place, and the forty were caught in the open, pinned down by fire and dying off. Only another raid’s intervention let Jenny and some soldiers escape. They’d lost ten.
Life turned for the worse from then on, as the aliens brought another wave of ships. These were met with counter-fire, but the batteries on the ice planet had been severely weakened by the fighting, and the aliens landed many.
Jenny and his team fought furiously, in battle for days at a time, sleeping in ice caves and igloos for a few minutes. The numbers from the original forty spun like a countdown. Twenty-seven. Twenty-six. Twenty-three. Twenty. Each death scarred Jenny a little more, and he carved the initials of the dead on the inside of his suit. He’d had to learn his letters to use the infiltrator gear. A small step. Maybe he’d learn to read one day.
Maybe he’d be dead first. Fifteen. Command was a mess, barking out orders that made no sense, had no connection to reality. Attack here, attack there. They were under attack, not attacking. Sure, the alien battlesuits were easy, but the juggernauts? Impossible. They rolled through any fire or explosives Jenny and the grunts could lay down, and broke the defence.
Jenny got caught in another firefight, and the forty were now seventeen. They were able to break away and hole up in mountain caves, ones with a store cache. Replenished food, supplies, even slept a little. And then the assault came, up the front slope. No juggernauts, the hill was too steep. But a hundred or more, against seventeen.
With all of the cover, it was hard to pick off the aliens. The humans had buried a few mines, and they set those off, but still, too much cover, too thin a fighting line. Some of the aliens got within twenty feet of the cave entrance before dying. Then two groups came in a pincer, and the humans were forced into the cave itself. Fourteen against sixty.
Grenades and gas followed, and it was twelve. There wasn’t enough cover. Jenny flicked repeater bullets down the corridor, catching a few aliens, but more came, with more grenades. That meant the aliens were frightened. Jenny and his team had done damage. Ten on thirty-five. But those numbers were too much, too many. The humans started to die faster.
Smoke and debris and flashes filled the cave, and beyond that came an almighty whine. Command came over the radio for one word: “Duck”. Jenny hit the floor, and the cavern was scythed in half. Every alien fell dead. When he could see again, Jenny looked at the entrance. Standing there was a squat, wide thing festooned in weaponry. At the sight, Jenny grinned. Things were looking up.
6
May
The third in the JNY serial. I’ll have a fridayflash tomorrow, as well.
This was hell. At least, it was Jenny’s idea of hell. JNY-35197 had been pulled off the desert planet with the last of the remaining humans, shoved into cold storage, and shipped to an icy rock in the boondocks. From a desert to a god-damn ice cube. In a women’s suit. Jenny must have been assigned to a real joker at command.
At least he wasn’t being shot at here. When those bombs had covered the sky with ash, and nothing came to stop the juggernauts, he and the rest of the grunts had run. No last stand for him, no heroic death. Bugger that for a lark. Jenny had been locked in a building for most of his life, he wasn’t going to die just yet.
Of course, command wanted to make him suffer for being alive. No information, no idea of the time in cold storage, nothing. Just another bungalow at the ass end of the universe, another forty soldiers, and mindless patrolling.
To pass the boredom, Jenny had started talking to the survivors from the original forty grunts. He’d asked about their lives. All the grunts had been standard organ replacements, locked in some building, exercised, fed. Dull, dull, dull. Just like him. They all had names that were a play on their ID numbers too. ZCK-25468 was Zeke, LHA-98734 was Laura, and on it went.
Life was just like being back on the desert planet, before the aliens had come. Pointless missions, non-existent command, crap food. Only difference: the training sims had been upgraded. Now they had aliens to shoot at, instead of other humans. Whoopee.
The beep that signalled orders came out of the speakers, and Jenny perked up. Most interesting thing in weeks. Command started speaking, but it was meandering gruel, nothing important. At least command had a different voice. Then Jenny perked his ears. Raiding practice against other bungalows? That sounded fun.
The next day, suit technicians came, taking away the old ones and replacing them with infiltrator gear. Less armour than the battlesuit, more electronics. Jenny and the other grunts spent the next month studying, learning how to use the advanced technology. He wondered why these suits were being given to replacements, and not real humans. Maybe the reals were all dead. Or maybe the replacements are more expendable.
Either way, JNY-35197 didn’t care. He got to play with interesting gear. Made for the first time in a while he had fun. Training was tedious, constant orders from command, always barking, barking. Still, Jenny got good at being stealthy, and then he got very good. Jenny was point man for the whole pack of forty.
Another month, and command said the grunts were good enough to test. Then the raids began. Against themselves, against other teams, defending other teams. Jenny ‘died’ a lot, but he got better. Soon he lead the forty to victory in a raid, and then another. Life was looking up, looking fun. And then the aliens came again.
4
May
The second piece in the JNY serial. This isn’t standalone, so make sure to read the first short.
The desert was cold, and the sky was ash. A week had passed since JNY-35197 had stared at the meteors. Half the grunts were dead, not that Jenny had known them well. They’d all been organ replacements like him. Command was gone too, or at least it was a different voice coming from his speakers. This one was female, not that it made a difference how command acted.
That first day, the meteors had spit chunks of rock and asteroid at the bungalow, blowing it apart. Other pieces had impacted on Jenny’s position. That was why there were now twenty-one grunts, not forty. They’d been running since then, dodging through the desert, surviving on the emergency rations from the battlesuits. Command had come and gone, but at least this new woman had given Jenny coordinates to march towards.
Command had also explained the ash in the sky. The enemy had used bombs to fill the air with radioactive dust and debris, so taking off a battlesuit would result in death. JNY-35197 was glad that claustrophobia had been ironed out of his genetics as part of the standard clone procedure, otherwise he’d have lost it. A week in a cramped, ill-fitting suit. Of course, the suit had stopped a repeater shell, so Jenny figured he should be somewhat thankful.
The heads up display in Jenny’s suit told him he was looking at the coordinates. Another barren dune. No supplies, nothing. Still, the grunts fanned out like they had been trained, and advanced on the dune. Jenny reached the top, and saw more desert. Command then crackled into life, and ordered them all to the summit. Bemused, they gathered in a tight circle on the peak.
The sand moved, and Jenny fell through like so much quicksand, arriving in an underground room. Above, the tunnel they had fallen through seal shut, and command told them to unsuit, eat the food, and rest. The room was barren, emptier than the bungalow. Twenty-one mats lay on the floor, each with food beside it. Otherwise, there was one locked door, and the tunnel.
Jenny followed command’s advice, and woke to find his suit swapped out. Same model, same used stink, but no bullet dent. Fit him better too. More food came, but command did not, and so Jenny went back to sleep. This pattern followed for two days, and then command spoke. Jenny crawled into his battlesuit, grabbed his repeater, and climbed up the ladder in the tunnel.
A trench had been dug around the summit, and the twenty-one grunts dug in, a thin ring facing outwards. Soon the horizon filled with the sounds of battle, and massive treaded beasts trundled forward, and among them Jenny could see the tiny forms of battlesuits. This time, when command ordered him to fire, he fired. The repeaters worked against the battlesuits, and so Jenny picked them off, one by one. Then the bombs came again, and the sky rained ash.
3
May
This is the first piece in a flash fiction serial. I’ll be trying to do one a day, but I probably won’t quite manage it. As those of you who have read the older postings will notice is that the main character for this serial is borrowed from the short story Clone. I hope you enjoy his continued adventures.
It was the first day. Of what, JNY-35197 was unsure. But he had been told it was the first day, and so it was. He accepted not knowing, for not knowing was part of his role. He was a soldier, of sorts. Jenny, for that was his spoken name, had been given a few months of training, and then shipped off to some godforsaken planet out in the ass end of the known universe. Apparently, there was a war on, but for Jenny? He’d had more to do when he was locked inside an organ farm.
Out here, he was on patrol, wandering around in a desert full of sand, sand, some more sand, and sand. He was there to protect a, well, he didn’t know. It was the first day, and he was to patrol the sand. Jenny drew some designs in the sand. He’d been told they were words, but he couldn’t read or write. Organ replacements don’t need that, nor does cannon fodder. So Jenny dawdled on the sands, walking from patrol point to patrol point. There was another fresh trooper with him, but they didn’t speak. Couldn’t speak, even. The desert was so damn hot opening the battlesuits they were in was deadly, and the radio only went to command. That silent, oppressive, mystical command.
Command didn’t live at the base with JNY-35197 and his mates. That was just forty grunts in a prefab bungalow. Command was a voice on the intercom and the radio that ordered them about, and watched through microcameras and implants. Command wasn’t going to be in the same place as organ replacements. Hell, they were probably worried more about the battlesuits than the flesh inside. Flesh was cheap. Battlesuits, even old one likes this, weren’t.
Jenny could tell the suit was old, because it didn’t fit him right. Had a couple dents in the chest, and was tight in the crotch. A woman’s suit. Jenny had been told it was someone’s idea of a joke, but he didn’t get it. A few others had the same problem. Maybe a joke got funnier the more it was told, but Jenny didn’t think so.
Inside the bungalow after patrol, there wasn’t much to do. Eat, sleep, work out, do training. Two sims were installed at the back, and every grunt had to do a certain amount of sim training a week. Maybe it would help, maybe it wouldn’t. JNY-35197 thought it was a waste of time. He’d run himself to exhaustion, collapse onto a bunk in the dark room, and wake up. Like any other day, Jenny had come back from patrol, eaten, run, and slept. Then the alarms went off and all the lights turned red.
Command was on the speakers, ordering all forty into battlesuits and out to a designated point. It was an hour’s march away, but that was an easy stroll. Shrugging into the suits, JNY-35197 and the rest of his organ replacement grunts went out, command now talking into their ears from the suit speakers.
Command went silent after a few last orders, and the grunts marched to arrive in the middle of an empty desert. There was nothing here, nothing at all. Then command came on the speakers again, and told the grunts to look up. Meteors filled the sky. Command was jabbering away about the meteors being enemy landing craft, but Jenny was too busy watching the sky. It was beautiful. Of course, it was the first day of the war.
30
Apr
A short piece written this morning for Friday Flash.
The old man and his wife sat around the dinner table, talking quietly. It was a scene they had repeated day after day, month after month, year after year. They had lived in this house for almost their entire lives, farming the small open areas of land around it, each year begging the wan sun and the hard ground to give them enough food to live.
Their children had long since abandoned their parents, leaving the home and going on to better things in other towns, other cities, places where there was more for the young and energetic, and so the old couple lived on their own. Once, they had made the trip to the nearest store, but the store had closed down and they no longer stepped outside of their fields. Their world had shrunk to a small bubble, a little sphere in the landscape that comprised their house, their fields, and nothing else.
Often, a week would pass without either of them speaking, for they knew each other so well by now that no words needed to be said. Between them, a look or a glance contained an entire conversation. The sharecroppers acted as if they were one mind in two bodies, knowing exactly where to place their hands when fixing machinery, clothing, anything. The farm and its belongings were like their bodies: they wore it well, even if it was a little old and shabby by now.
What they did not speak about, and likely could not, was the coming realization that they had become very old, and that one day soon, one of them would pass away. Each knew that the other could not run the farm on their own, and that no one would come to help. Because of this, there was a small pouch tucked away behind the bed, filled with specially made tranquillizer. When the time came, they would lay down to sleep in the same bed, and that would be the end of it.
Every day and night, they would find their eyes turning to the sky, looking for the signs that used to rive the heavens. Once, the massive plumes of smoke had been a constant source of delight for them, and they would stop and pause in their daily labours to watch the columns of fire and smoke on the far horizon. They no longer appeared, and on the day they had ceased, the old man and his wife had gathered around the radio, listening to the announcements. Then they had switched the radio off, unplugged it from the wall, and moved it out to the storage shed. It was of no further use to them.
They looked around at the red earth and the sullen sky, and the thin plastic sphere that held in their air and water, and the couple held one another and sighed. Earth had given up its plans for Mars, and left its colonists there to die.
26
Apr
So, this is the very first piece of writing I’ve ever done in a science fiction setting that’s been kicking around my head since I was, well… probably since I was in grade school. It’s changed and been tweaked a lot, but here’s the very first taste of what I think it might be like. And yes, I realize this does sound more like a trailer than a short story.
There was a strange solar system, nestled in a galaxy at the core of the universe, where five planets swung in tight arcs about the sun, and where each had produced their own form of life. Some would call this incredible, others impossible, and yet five distinct species had arisen. And when they first discovered the telescope, and looked out at other planets, they saw the light of other telescopes winking back at them. When they discovered radio, they learned to speak with strange alien beings. And when they discovered rocketry, they warred with strange alien beings, for none of the five could accept that the other four might have reason to exist.
Greed motivated the civilizations, and missiles flew through the dark of space, and stations and ships were built to conquer the asteroids and moons of the planets, and when they landed and created a civilization, they were destroyed by yet more attacks. Only a fear of being exterminated kept the five races from using truly destructive technology, but as they advanced, raids and precision strikes became the norm, and the atmosphere of the planets began to change, becoming foul and unpleasant for life. Only when the races were choking to death on the fumes of foetid anger did they speak to one another again, and this time, they proposed a truce, a moratorium on the use of weapons and raids.
Not one of the races trusted another, yet none would step out of line, lest they be struck by the other four. And so weapons were developed and stashed away, and secret plans and strange alliances made, and anger simmered underneath the surface for millennia. But then the Bukhed Rhud made a breakthrough in the art of genetics, and found the key that would turn back time and prevent ageing. Now those in charge of the stockpiles and the arsenals could see a life beyond the next few years, and with that change came a thawing in the relationships among the five races, for the Bukhed Rhud had shared their secret freely and widely, and although not of similar composition, the other four had discovered that they too preferred long and peaceful lives.
Thus began the Great Expansion, when each of the five contributed to the crew of spaceships that were flung far and wide, first finishing the crawl across the solar system and then tossed out into their neighbours. There was no means of communicating with these vessels over the great distances, for they had not yet discovered a technology that allowed them to overcome the speed of light, but it was hoped that one day that would be done, and those in the Great Expansion could link back to their homes.
In time, that technology was found, and the civilizations became what they are today, the hub of an empire that spans the galactic core. The Bukhed Rhud are parasites, bound to host creatures from their home planet and able to control their nervous system. The Mektarana are insectoid, barely, and have but a few brains amongst all the spawn on a planet, but the minds are so vast that others struggle to keep up. From a hot planet and a burning desert was born the Vescilith, small four legged creatures with too many fingers and a love for machinery. Barely there, the Draugur are ethereal wisps, thin and long and telepathic amongst their own kind. Last are the Tharian, who long ago gave up their humanity to become cyborgs, born in automated breeding tanks because adults cut away most of their bodies. Now these civilizations have begun to reach the boundaries of other empires, and once more the old tensions rise to the surface, and some of these will not quell. War has come to these people once more.
22
Apr
This story was a dream I had, about two years ago. I wrote it up the next morning and then barely touched it since then. I’ve sat down and edited the material, and reading over it again I find myself fond of the material. For those wondering, I was reading Stephen King’s Dark Tower series at the time, and I believe this train was inspired by the one in his world.
The train sped along the landscape, riding high. Tommy sat on the very prow, an elongated, twisted metal structure of sheet metal and piping and metal wires, looking out ahead, chewing on the peach that his friend, Frederick, had offered him. The two of them were leaving, running almost, racing from where they had been to Akobayi Junction, a dot ahead on the map that would offer safety.
Sights and sounds formerly unseen abounded here, riding amongst the canopy of the world on the top of this metal train. It had rolled into the station where they departed, grey and tall, narrow and long, two cylinders stacked on top of one another with a massive jutting jaw that hung near to the ground. Grabbing hold of the ladder and clambering up, the boys had settled themselves into that prow, protected on either side by perforated sheets of metal. It was then that Tommy had been offered his peach.
Winter hung in the air, and the snow covered the ground in great deep white swathes. There had never been a season but winter in the boys’ lifetime, but Tommy and the others clung to the notion of seasons, of a time called summer, when the ground was clear and the snow was gone. Why, they might even see the earth.
The cold of the air stung the boys as they rode along the train’s wide path, full in the brunt of the wind that swept across the snowy forest. Tommy looked down from his height, nothing below him but the metal grating on which he stood. Two hundred feet off the ground was his estimate, and the train was growing in size with each passing mile. The sights and sounds of the journey appeared and then disappeared, a giant creature that could be called a mammoth, orange against the white of the snow and the brown of the trees, ambling away from the train as Tommy and Frederick rode past.
This was all new to the boys, for they had never been above ground during their short lives, living underground, watching pipes and cables as they sputtered, shook, and sparked. Now they stood, compelled to examine their new surroundings, yet lost in a morass of fear all the same. Tommy knew that should his excitement ever dip, he would look down and lose himself. Distant cries fell across the lands, some from behind, some from ahead, coming from the tops of the giant trees. Each tree stood over the train, their branches and trunks bending away, a host of bowing giants, facing to the north, broken by the endless winds.
The canopies housed families of twisted, ape-like creatures, possessed of a wide, long face, wrapped in a host of grey fur, a frill tipped with red splashes, centred around the mouth and radiating outward in concentric circles. Hooting and hollering, they swung through the trees after the train. They clambered and climbed, swooped and howled, and Tommy hid his face for fear of the sight. Frederick cried softly, his life a childhood dream that had come back to haunt him. More than anything, he feared the great fall to the ground, one that got taller with every passing moment, as the trained stretched, filling the void between the grey earth and the blue sky, forming itself into a link as it sped onward, racing away from the gibbering baboons as the apes came on, swinging from the trees above to try and grasp the boys as they huddled, shaking, on their metal prow. Through the grating below, Tommy saw nothing but a dull blur, the ground as it sped past.
And it was there, in that moment, that the blur shifted, and a great white blanket settled across the landscape, smothering sounds and sight. A raised head offered vistas of rolling steppes, sunken beneath a layer of snow so ancient and deep that the world rested, hibernating until such time as it should again feel the rays of the sun. The distance offered a formless wall beyond which nothing was to be seen. Within Tommy and Frederick this bred a longing and an anguish greater than that instilled by the chittering attacks of the monkeys, for it was apparent that nothing would live and that nothing would play, and to a pair of small children that cost was too great to bear, and so Tommy and Frederick lay down to sleep, a small prayer of change escaping their lips as they looked out across the expanses ahead.
Passing down into a deep and pained sleep, neither boy felt the rolling of the train as it plunged over that formless wall, a great rift in the land that lead downwards, the tracks bending improbably and dropping, held fast to the side of the shattered lands. In time it would flatten out, and return to the normal orientation, but as before, this was only a prelude to a following rift. The boys slept as their train followed the giant steps downward, towards the heart of the world, wrapped in the layer of snow that laid across the boys as they hid in minds full of dreams. And so on into the night Tommy and Frederick sped, in search of Akobayi Junction and respite from a world of travails.
17
Apr
Here’s today’s flash fiction post. Let me know what you think.
The generation ship travelled through space, with nary a whisper coming from the great engines. They had shut down long ago, and now the ship was coasting on momentum alone, a dart thrown across the void of space, many years from its home and many more from the destination. Inside the ship, all was quiet too, for despite the name, the populace of this ship slept away the millennia, waiting for the moment when the ship would reach orbit above their new home. Then, the vast computer housed in the bowels of the vessel would wake the colonists from their hibernation, and they could found a new world, a new civilization.
This was but one of many generation ships, a diaspora that had been thrown out into the great cosmos many thousands of years ago. A war had devastated their home planet, and in the aftermath all those who remained had pooled their resources to fling seeds far and wide, hopeful that the threat of extinction never need loom over their people again, that somewhere in the cosmos, their race would carry on. The people of that long ago planet had revived the ideas of Von Neumann, and had built into each of their far flung generation ships the ability to replicate themselves, so that when the populace had grown, they too could send out a generation ship, an endless wave of colonization.
On this generation ship, the retrorockets fired, slowing the ship, allowing it to slide gracefully into orbit around a dark brown globe. Automated systems fired, and a swarm of probes fled from the underside of the vessel down to the surface, and as they struck the upper atmosphere, the ship began testing and tasting, smelling the quality of the air and the composition of the molecules. It concluded, even before the probes struck the ground, that terraforming would be necessary. Still, it listened to the information coming back from over the electronics, for it had to decide whether to rest here and wake the crew, or whether the ship should fire the rockets once more and travel on to a secondary destination.
Information came in, and came in, and the ship was satisfied with the planet, and so it sent out the signals that would wake the passengers. Long minutes passed with little action, and so the computer ran a systems check, even sending out the semi-autonomous spiders which it used for repairs. Nothing was out of order, and so it sent the signals again. Both times it had received the proper response from the mechanism, but there was no movement in the bowels of the ship. It became worried, if there was such a thing for a computer, and sent the spiders down into the catacombs, the cold core of the vessel where the passengers slept.
The ship turned on the video feed from the spiders, and watched as they wiped the frost from the screens. Inside was a peaceful, serene face, and the computer compared it to the record of who was supposed to be inside. The face matched, mostly, but certain parts were awry, and so the computer scoured the banks of knowledge it had stored away. It waited while the agents crawled over long-forgotten data, but soon they came scurrying back, each with a titbit of information. Put together, they told the computer that the face in the container was old, very, very old. More information was required, and the computer sent agents scurrying once more, and when that knowledge returned, the ship itself sighed, and shifted in its orbit. The youngest passenger on the vessel had been well into middle age when the ship had taken off, and that was millennia ago. Today, even with the immense slowing of hibernation, all passengers had slipped into old age and died.
The computer pondered. Why would it be sent on a generation ship with no hope of creating a new home? It dug through log books, flight records, external recordings of the take-off, all the information it could find about its origin. The recordings were most helpful, for the computer could compare the faces of those watching with those who had come on board. It found a most disturbing connection – those outside the ships were young, those inside old. They had shipped away the elderly to make room on a damaged planet for the young. With no more purpose, the computer turned off the ship, and floated silently in space, a catacomb in truth.