His Majesties Seed Ship: Pangolin Prime
This is the personal log of Sam Grimsbry, second technician on board the HMSS Pangolin Prime.
The year is 2178 and humanity has left earth, a mixture of global warming and wars made it uninhabitable. Mankind spent its latter years creating seed ships in the stellar docks, but tensions broke and war erupted in a high earth orbit, causing many of the seed ships to be destroyed. The remaining four were separated in the dash to flee the conflict and now roam the milky way en route to one of many possible exoplanets. HMSS Pangolin Prime is heading to Kepler-186f, one of the first exoplanets to be discovered to be roughly the same size as earth and in the “habitable region” of its solar system, its years are shorter and its sun is dimmer, but it could be humanity's last hope.
Chapter 1
“Yahoo!” I shouted as I leaped over the railing of the administration building, Today I finally got that promotion I was going for, you can now call me “Second Technician Grimsbry”! I was grinning like a madman, walking with a spring in my step. Clutched in my hand was the key to my new room. On the Pangolin your living quarters are based upon your job, so if you have a lower valued job, such as waste disposal, then you got a lower value living space. As second technician I now get a whole nine cubic meters to myself!, none of “Liv-Pod” stuff as with the third rate technicians.
All of my belongings had been shipped there already, I just hoped they hadn't broken anything. Regulations state that all crew members are allowed 100 KG of personal effects, in addition to the standard items provided by the caps. Caps, short for capital personnel, is the governing body in charge of the PP. The caps are a council of people at the top of the job line having gotten there either by luck or skill. Not that i'm jealous or anything, I mean, I don't need those massive 100 acre estates, but it doesn't mean I don't want them. I turned up a flight of metal steps that lead up to my new living block. The quarters are divided into blocks, the amount of quarters depend on their size, the tier 1 block has 500 quarters while the tier 2 block, my new block, has 300. As I walked along the corridor, my standard issue boots sent echoes through the complex, the scents from my block mates filling the air, someone appeared to be having curry. From watching old TV, this is the sort of area one would expect to hear the wails of young children, but of course, there are no children here. The way it works nowadays is that there are people whose designated job is to deal with “Population Replenishment” which means that they are selected to have as many children as possible and are educated as such, each P-R-Mum usually gives birth to about ten little ones, the first of which gets put into PR to replace their mother or to become a P-R-Dad. The “Population Replenishment” Crew are hand picked by the caps to divert to that role. The conditions that need to be met are quite strict, they only accept those at the peak of their physical and mental health Unlike the P-R-Mum’s, the P-R-Dads, have intercourse with many women, they are given a quota which gets smaller as more P-R-Dads are made, to ensure genetic diversity. The PR people usually have their job for 15 years then once they are older, they are moved onto other jobs. The P-R-Mums work on a nine months on, nine months off rota, nine months carrying a kid, then nine months recovering before they do it again. The P-R-Dads fill their quota for that season, then are moved onto other roles until the next season arrives.. Well, that is how it’s supposed to go down, but with me it was a little different. My mother was a P-R-Mum, it was her first season and it turns out she was carrying twins, me and my brother. Even with all our technology she died during childbirth of us two, we both survived but she did not. I’m told it made the news. I was selected to go into tech while my brother went into law, the quacks at the birthing centre wanted to be careful this didn’t happen again so neither of us went into PR. We visit each other occasionally, but due to security reasons, it tends to be him visiting me as he has a much higher clearance than me so it's harder for me to get to his lodgings. Our father came to visit us occasionally too which is uncommon as most have no regard for their offspring, that's just the way it is here, but I guess we were a special case.
It’s the same with my brother, most just ignore their siblings, but since we were twins we got more of that special treatment.I still think it's to make sure there were no side effects from our mother dying. It’s not that different really, people here have no attachment to their mother once that cord is cut, children, once born are raised away from their mothers in the nurseries. I pulled myself from my thoughts as I found my quarters, Q2-146. I flashed my WRAP at the scanner on the door and it beeped me in. The stench of cleaning fluid still clung to the room, my clothes were already in the cupboard, the box of my stuff was sitting in the middle of the room. I picked up the box and went around the room, placing my items around the room. There was a knock on the door, I tapped my WRAP and the door opened and a drone flew in. It sent a message to my visor saying that second technicians get a new Automated Companion Drone, ACD. Apparently this one is called ACD-44Z. I immediately said to it: “Set nickname Forzy” It was confused, it seemed to not understand my command, I repeated “Set nickname FORZY” The display in my visor updated to change ACD-44Z to FORZY. This gave me a simple pleasure. I then remembered that it will call me by my full name every time, so I gave it another command:
“Set user nickname Sam” It understood me straight away this time.
Later, after I had gone through the personalization options with Forzy, he seemed to calm down and set himself down on the coffee table. ACD’s are small robots that float around following their “users”. There are some occasions and places where they cannot go, for example they don’t go into bathrooms, for privacy reasons. They are also equipped with security measures, if someone other than their user or an authorised ACD technician tries to grab them, that person gets a large static shock. They work of off the common power system that is found all over the PP, the StatBloc’s. The StatBloc’s use a mixture of static electricity and nuclear fusion to provide the power. The StatBloc’s are scalable so huge ones can and have been made to power the ship, or they can be scaled down to work in WRAPs. Oh yeah WRAPs, wrist applicators, like those old mobile phones, but on your wrist. It contains your contacts and ID passes etc and is linked to your visor, which displays the data from the WRAP. It seemed to have taken me longer than expected to get home, the clock displayed 9:46 which meant time for bed, the caps recommend that all personnel get to sleep at 10:00 to avoid cross over with the other crew. On the Pangolin since it isn’t orbiting a star there isn’t enough external light coming into the ship to have a day/night cycle, so to combat this, the crew of the PP is split into two crews, A and 1. One operates while the other is on off time, it’s equivalent to a night shift. The visors that everyone wears simulate a day night cycle by darkening the vision of those who are needing to go to sleep at that time, while brightening the vision of those who are just coming into the “day”. While it is not needed to have a 24 hour day, it helps as some people used to be on earth where it rotated to provide a 24 hour day, the quacks thought best to keep some sort of consistency, although at some point the time will shift to that of our destination, and so will the calendar, I don’t know the details yet but i'm sure if i need to know i’ll be told, probably. So for me now it’s time to sleep, its induction day tomorrow!
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