• View
• Edit
• History
• Print

Tigris

Unofficial sequel to https://www.badspacecomics.com/post/rivers-end

When the Empire of Man crumbled, the Tigris endured. We had built her well.

She sped on, her engines a marvel of engineering. Her destination, a lush world. We wouldn't see it; our grandchildren would. At six nines close to the speed of light, a hundred years aboard, a thousand outside. But her body, more biology than machine, began to perish. And we, her crew, did what we could to save her. She was a world to us, and thanks to plentiful stores and vigilant recycling, we wanted for little. We lived and died and bred, faithful to our mission.

As the biological systems of the ship decayed, we adapted. When the bees died, we pollinated. We froze the last bird when it stopped singing. Eventually, we had to close the loop, cut down the forests before they could decay, so we'd have fibers for the replicators. We replaced gardens with holograms, deck walks with virtual journeys.

As time went on, pitiless new equations took hold, and we had to tighten the loop further. Legs were sacrificed to conserve energy, replaced by prosthetics. Arms became tools, organs became filters and pumps. Eyes became cameras, for the few times we had to look outside.

When our brains began to fail, from boredom or anger or stress, we calmed them down, tamed them, replaced bit by bit with dependable circuitry. All for efficiency; all for the mission; a neural pacesetter was easier to run than a virtual world.

Bit by bit, bit to bit, we became nodes in the ship's network, each death sold to us as an opportunity for mechanical rebirth.

And when the last neuron stopped firing, cycle by cycle, the processes that were the imprint of us were slowed down as unessential, for the sake of the mission. Slowed, and then effectively stopped, each waiting for an interaction from a living mind that was no longer there.

The ship and her drones, of course, knew the mission plan. And would execute it to the letter. She needed no Theseus.

No amount of hypertech can work around physics; the Tigris' destination was set at the start, and the ship faithfully reached its journey's end. A rare Terran-type planet, colonizable, inhabitable. Flora and fauna resembling the Paleozoic era, no native sophonts to exterminate. A rare prize.

One which the Tigris and her robotic crew no longer needed; there were no human passengers to disembark, no ecosystem to regenerate. Those functions simply stayed dormant. Instead, the Tigris let herself coast to an ice comet, consuming it for reaction mass. The repopulation phase of the program was skipped, but the program itself continued. Travel to the star system's asteroid belt equivalent; build mines, reactors, solar arrays. All to standard templates, modular designs that were built faithfully and adapted efficiently. Corridors that never saw a footstep, berths that never held a warm body. Cafeterias that never cooked a meal.

This star system could sustain automated operations for upward of a billion years; even a million was barely a notch.

The last memories and thought patterns of humanity archived to long-term storage, the ship continued her work, repairing and fortifying herself as needed. When enough infrastructure had been built on asteroids and moons that maintenance took more than half of the ship's time, she reproduced, creating smaller craft with no interstellar capability but which could zip around maintaining the empty installations; interplanetary drones.

A hypothetical alien would see a star system filled with the equivalent of empty, Brutalist mansions, each awaiting a nonexistent master or mistress to open the front door for the first time.

The number of nanoseconds since the Tigris performed orbital insertion had been recorded with 512-bit precision, and was meaningless. But it was after a million-plus years that the service ship Ticino (the Tigris' spawn had been, unimaginatively, named according to a list of Terran rivers, most of which were putrid or dry at the time of launch; enough had been made to reach the letter T again) caught something unexpected on radar. A derelict. No, the Euphrates. All systems offline, drifting in at a fraction of her intended arrival velocity.

The processors aboard the Ticino correctly determined that the enormous hulk could not be slowed down properly by her relatively small thrusters, and so inexorably, she escalated, calling the mothership. This took weeks in Terran time, but as space maneuvers go, it was surprisingly swift. The Tigris would match velocities and then dock with the stricken Euphrates according to a contingency plan written a million years ago. According to the plan, the crew of the working ship would then proceed to restore power to the damaged ship.

The docking maneuver required a number of attempts and caused superficial damage to the Tigris, swiftly repaired by automated systems until hard docking was achieved and, for the first time in forever, LED lights came on in the Euphrates' rusty corridor, on external power.

But there was no rescue crew to make the entry. The contingency plan did not cover restarting a process that was once a human being.

For hours, as the Tigris worked her spotless and useless life support system to capacity to rebuild what was left of the Euphrates' atmosphere, there was no sound but pumps and impellers.

And then something unused to the light, something pale, something scared, crawled through the newly lit corridor, in the opposite direction that the Tigris had calculated.

The creature had no voice, barely a mind -- but enough curiosity left to slither past the docking adapter. The creature bumped into a drone, one of those that once had lips that sang. The drone analyzed the elongated hand, the papery skin, the raspy breath. It did not judge. This creature was human enough.

It was sufficient. A human interaction; one that warranted waking up the digitized crew member. In less than six seconds, the drone duly shut down its own automatic processor and relinquished control of its body to the digitized mind that had once inhabited it.

After a million years of preprogrammed messages nobody was there to hear or understand, the first words, from what was left of a human mind, to what was left of a human body.

The words that would be remembered as the beginning of the beginning.

"Whoa! What the f-"