Just one more day...
Finally, our one-hundred-and-eight year voyage to Sol and back draws to a close. It was so
long ago and yet I can remember it as vividly as yesterday.
There was a procession in our honor on the day we embarked... Hundreds of Falcons tugged our
beautiful new home from its construction moorings while many more lined the starry sky to see
us off. I remember how my crew and I were drunk with the enormity of our accomplishment, and
with the many toasts that had occurred the night before. As I stood upon the bridge of the
Tannhauser, I gazed down upon the mechanical marvel of the behemoth we had created - and
stood tall as if a god.
Our mission was simple - to pick a direction and continue along it until we re-discovered the
remains of our birthplace, the old Earth. Our greatest scientific minds had augured a
direction for us to go, and a distance by which we should have arrived - and thus, we sailed
for more than a century.
Instead of going to sleep during our long journey through the black, we decided to stay
awake. Resources were not a problem - air and water was recycled, food was grown with
hydroponics, and fuel was abundant.
We had prepared well - we had children and teachers, engineers and builders, soldiers and
philosophers, researchers and repairers; the makings for a colony of our own if need be.
Our curiosity, of course, got the better of us on the long way to Sol - we mapped our route
extensively, and explored many worlds that had piqued our interests. We collected the genetic
codes of many hundreds of thousands of indigenous species we had encountered, as well as many
hundreds of thousands of samples of curious materials and substances.
In even such a narrow, straight band from Sirius to the projected location of our cradle,
there was much to be seen - From dying stars, to thriving green worlds, we'd seen them all.
We'd seen pulsars fire off the heartbeat of the whole of creation, and we marveled at its
magnificence.
Then everything went wrong.
Seven years into our voyage, we encountered spaceborn spores off the heliopause of a system
we designated Argus-3. On collection, the spores were deemed inert and were flash frozen then
stored for later research.
By random chance, perhaps compounded by poor laboratory procedure on the part of one of the
many apprentice researchers tasked with preserving and cataloging the many collected samples
of our explorations, a single spore escaped into our ventilation system. From there, it
drifted through the vast network of air cyclers and stuck in the warm filters of a
humidifier.
My xenobotanists tell me that this in itself would not have resulted in the spore germinating
- they tell me that a special kind of radiation is required for the spore to come out of
stasis and to fester as it did.
As luck would have it, my radiologists told me that the entire ship had been exposed to that
exact type of radiation of just the right frequency and intensity to trigger the spore.
As irony would have it, I was the one to order the ship to be irradiated in an attempt to
sterilize the ship from an epidemic of flesh eating molds that had been plaguing us at the
time... courtesy of a poorly sealed can of tomatoes, and a recently dumped geneticist with a
horrible sense of humor.
Ah well... several years passed, and the spore gave rise to a large patch of... what my
xenobotanists call the gametophyte phase of - screw it. It looked like moss. Orange moss. As
moss does, it spread throughout the ventilation systems of our ship and released many
billions of spores into our air.
At first, apart from the occasional allergic reaction, nothing happened - we hardly noticed
until the cleaners complained of a residue of micro-particulates covered most of the ionized
surfaces inside the ship. By then, it was too late to quarantine and dispose of the spores or
the moss - we'd already eaten, drank, and breathed contaminated food drink and air.
Upon further research, the moss was a type of engineered life form similar to another plant
found on Omicron Alpha. Unlike the Cardamine, however, the spore form was immature and did
not have the psychotropic effects of its more mature cousin. Still, they told me that we'd be
unable to survive without a steady dose either ingested, injected, or inhaled, and that it
had retroactively altered parts of our genome - though we don't know to what effect.
Of course, we couldn't let the stuff grow in our ventilation shafts - not only did the
cleaning crew protest, the mechanics and the computer technicians all complained of the
microscopic spores screwing with their respective jobs. In the end, we ended up growing the
stuff in one of our terrariums - and pressed them into rations of snack bar sized portions.
They don't taste very good, but it worked. anywho-
We continued on our course to the potential location of the Sol System for an additional
forty years, still exploring worlds and picking up souvenirs (this time with proper
containment procedures and redundant security systems).
Fifty three years into the voyage, the projected time at which we were supposed to reach the
projected location of Sol, we detected nothing. There was nothing there; no sun, no planets,
not even the ruins of a system. Suffice to say... we weren't pleased. We searched for an
additional decade, hopping from system to system but to no avail. When a little less than
half of our long-range engines were expended, we decided to turn back and return home.
Of course, it wasn't as simple as that. As fate would have it, we had wandered into the
gravity well of a nearby dwarf star about ten years into our trip back - the result of a
glitch in the navigational system, later deemed to be due to microparticle contamination of
the hosting logic chips. Aside from a snide remark at the janitorial staff, we managed to
break free from the well at the cost of our jump engines. Reaching the relative safety of a
class E system, we settled down for an additional thirty years - searching for a means of
returning home.
It was decided that there was not enough materials available to construct a replacement jump
engine for the Tannhauser - but enough to construct a faster, more efficient jump engine for
a smaller craft. The idea was proposed to fit this engine on a warp receptacle coil - what my
engineers tell me is a one-way version of the jumpgate technology that was being implemented
during the time we left Sirius.
With the receptacle craft constructed from raw materials gathered from the various worlds of
three nearby systems - we fired it homewards. From the remains of our jump engines, we made a
one-way jump gate, which would tunnel the space between the Tannhauser and the receptacle
craft for quick travel. Most of my physicists re-assured me that the odds of collapsing both
the entrance and exits into a pair of micro-singularities was minimal, and that the phenomena
of spontaneous disintegration which a small minority of researchers told me would result was
also unlikely.
my scientists told me that the warp receptacle craft would reach home in approximately twenty
years, give or take several centuries depending on the reaction of our newly researched
designs for the ship's engines with our grasp on warp theory. In any event, the arrival of
the ship at its destination should be indicated by an intense tachyon beam emission straight
to our sensors, after which, we would open up the gate from our end and jump home.
Three days ago, we received confirmation that the receptacle craft had just arrived.
Preparations have been made, and we're ready to go home. As there is a chance that we may be
rended atom by atom - small as it is - I've decided to leave this message, along with our
research and logs encoded into several black boxes and scattered in space. Six have been shot
in opposite directions, where they will travel for eternity until it is picked up or is
destroyed. One will remain stationary where we stand. One has been shot into a stable orbit
around a nearby black hole, where it will stay trapped for time immemorial.
