1. It was my mother who first discovered the fuel leak. Or at least, that’s what we thought it was then. My grandmother, who was the last of us to have set foot on Earth, had died the month before. We had gathered in the laundry atrium, which was the largest open space without ongoing maintenance work, and made such tribute as we could: this is one of the first things I remember. My mother said it felt like a new era, like we were on our own. Although of course we had been out of radio contact with Earth for many years by then. And then, so soon after: the fuel numbers didn’t quite add up. The guardian angels of the old world gone, and we were on our own. But we had excess fuel against unplanned contingencies. It was the slowest of slow leaks. No big deal.
2. There is another thing that is odd about the path of the ship: sometimes it makes corrections that we did not tell it to make. Not often, but sometimes. I wish I could say that I was the one who discovered this, but I think it was Grace Cao who first noticed it. The ship does have a mechanism for external course corrections. It was designed for two circumstances: to retrieve the ship in the case of the crew becoming somehow disabled at launch, and at the fabled other end: for our children’s children’s children to be guided into port on the new worlds by the settlers who had landed before them. It uses a separate communications channel: minimal data and supposedly programmable across huge distances. But it is entirely possible that it is buggy. Still, the end point of our journey is the system that it always was. Also, hopefully, no big deal.
3. Over the years, we have gone from thinking of the ship as a complex but explicable machine to thinking of it as a mysterious engine that we cannot quite control. Too much not quite lining up. Maintenance is turning into ritual. The Machine is turning up in the old stories from Earth. It keeps us alive but it can punish us. It is capricious and sometimes angry. So we were ready for the latest development, I suppose. Too ready: there is so me scandal down in engineering with Peter and the Adeosun wards, and I have heard people say, joking-not-joking, that our fuel problems are down to moral failing.
4. Nevertheless, I think the changes we now see are more likely to belong in the domain of the fuel leak. And this time they are worrying. If we sustain this level of fuel depletion to our destination, we will be out of reserves. Too many things to go wrong. There has been an uptick in the rate of fuel loss, and no obvious reason for it. I sent Xuebing and Grace Cao out on a spacewalk to inspect the fuel tanks. It has been a long time since since anyone went on spacewalk. We had to fire up the fabricator to print a new seal for the second suit. But they have not found anything external.
5. The way it fluctuates is curious. I am not sure that we are looking at this the right way.
6. Of course, the other option is that it is something in our course correction. We have certainly not made any deviation in heading for years, intentionally or unintentionally. It cannot be that. Could it be speed correction? We are at the speed we would expect to be at, at this point in the journey. But if were to deviate from this, the ship would automatically intervene to put us back. It would use fuel. But why would it need to? We are in deep space. We are as alone as any humans have ever been. There is nothing here to slow us down.
7. Some further time has passed. Grace Sharma has been plotting the anomaly. But I fear now that we are already beyond the point where the mission is lost. We will not be able to correct at the other end. Perhaps when we get there we can send the settlers a distress call. Perhaps they can rescue us somehow.
8. The crew at the bridge all know it now, but for the while we have not told the others. Maybe there is some way out. If only we knew what was happening! It is hard to extract the information, but with Bernard-Rose and Grace’s help I think we have it confirmed: the engines are running at a higher rate than they should for what is supposed to be primarily a power-generation role On a whim, I tried assuming the missing fuel had gone into speed correction. What could the forces on the ship have been to cause that? And out came the plot, like a dream, like a nightmare. Because this was a curve that I had seen before.
9. The Wang-Fernstell curve. Physics class. One of a range of competitors to the standard model of quantum gravity. A fringe idea, really. In any case not experimentally confirmable on the small scales available in the solar system. But on a long voyage across deep space: yes, absolutely confirmable. You would observe a slow deceleration over time, oscillating in a distinctive way, increasing in magnitude. Or, if you had a ship that corrected for that sort of thing, you would gradually run out of fuel. And then stop. In deep space. So it seems we have made an incredibly important discovery about the structure of the Universe. And it seems that we will never be able to tell anyone about it. It seems that we are doomed.
10. I have told the others. The ship is very quiet. I cannot stop thinking of all the ships that went before us, of all the ships that will come after. Did they all make this discovery, once they were beyond hope of rescue? Are they all lost? Is the Earth even now churning out new ships to drift, lifeless, into the void, and pinning all its future hopes on them? We have turned off the speed correction in the hope of saving fuel for power, though we will be able to eke a tiny amount out of the solar panels when that fails. But now, of course, the ship has started making course corrections again, ones that we cannot override. Of course. I have asked Peter to move up to the kitchen hold. It is not at all clear that he is safe.
11. Another correction. We are going to run out of fuel. We are coming towards our final resting place.
12. We are coming towards our final resting place. And there is something there. Something gleaming in the starlight up ahead. It is hard to make out. A complex, huge, many-looped grey thing, studded across with tiny lights.
13. It is the ships. It is the other ships. Thousands and thousands of them, all linked up: something between a space station and a planet. We are within radio range of it now. And they have been calling us! We are to dock at the nearmost point. They called us from an atrium full of trees. Trees! I have never seen such a thing. But why not use some of the seeds now, whilst they lie becalmed? And maybe it will not be forever. They say there may be something they can make of the new physics, some way to make these odd forces work for us. But for now I am just marvelling at the thing they have made. It has states. There are parts of it where the languages are diverging. There are parts of it that worship the myth of the machine. We will all have to choose where to live and what to work on. So much to do, to keep it alive!
14. But one thing still to do now: use the remaining fuel to power up the long-range transmitter. We need to send the requisite course corrections to the next ship down the line.
