TOI-700

Despite our proximity to TOI-700 it was a regular day in Observation Array III, with the three of us seated in our stations and keeping an eye on the visual feed and also, per our training, monitoring the error logs for any hashfails in the scans on TOI-700-D. No hashfails so far. Just a regular day, like I was saying, with only minor growing excitement, tamped easily by murmured reminders to each other to remain steadfast. Following protocol in pursuit of our glorious mission. Just the three of us, "us" being Hannah Sanders, Little Hal and myself, your humble narrator, remaining, as always, steadfast and glorious, as per our training.

I was leaning against the bulkhead as I sometimes did, which was to say I was leaning against it carefully, noticing my own movements, so as to not accidentally via a careless shoulder or gesticulation erase several generations of height markings which our predecessor Crews Of 44 had made on it. Occasionally, when the generally steadfast Observation Array III seats hurt the small of my back I leaned this way. It allowed me a great view of the monitors and also Hannah Sanders, who I liked to keep in my field of vision in case there was something I could do for her or in case she wanted to talk to me.

Little Hal was talking about his on-again off-again relationship with Naomi Leggett.

"No one gets me like Naomi," he was saying. I was only half paying attention because I was also trying to edge sideways in case Hannah Sanders wanted to notice me.

"That's cool," I told him. Little Hal kept going. I knew from the tone of his voice that he was at the start of a story and I'd only need to respond to the end. Little Hal, although small, was a fabulous storyteller. It was an ingenious compensation. Particularly because we were all small. Certainly compared to the first and second generations who had begun the tradition of marking their heights against the bulkhead. Some of them 175 centimetres, even 180 centimetres. These days I was one of the tallest and I was only 162 centimetres. Not the tallest. That was Jake Pendergast. But Little Hal was the absolute rock bottom smallest, having lived to 26 years old and only being 143 centimetres tall for his trouble, plus thin and hairless like a boy, with only 28 teeth and fingernails that he could poke the tip of a pencil through. But he had a loud and hearty voice and knew how to use it.

"...it's scary, dude," he was saying. "For sure," I said firmly, by way of validation. I looked to Hannah Sanders to see if she would also validate Little Hal’s insights but she was looking steadfastly at her monitor, being generally less inclined to be whisked away by Little Hal’s storytelling, and also not in a friendship arrangement with Naomi Leggett, whose presence in Little Hal’s stories as a driver of much conflict and erotic intrigue had at times become an issue about which our Crew Of 44 had to be steadfast. Also she may have been hungover.

“Perhaps your conversation could find an alternative outlet,” I suggested to Hal. I was not trying to disrespect him, despite how it may seem. I cared about his relationship with Naomi, but his story was overwhelming my ability to notice Hannah Sanders. She was tucking a wispy blonde curl behind one ear. She had a small flat piece of dark, polished wood that her ancestors had brought aboard the Noble Pursuit with them and she liked to twirl it between her fingers. She was twirling it now.

He ignored me. "Naomi always knows how to situate herself in relation to me," Little Hal continued. "Let me give you an example. I'll finish a tough shift in the camera room and she'll be there, ready to pin me up against the engine room bulkhead - and you know how strong she is - and do a little procreating with me."

"Uh huh," I said. His fables of procreation with Naomi Leggett had, in addition to being a sometime source of controversy aboard the Noble Pursuit, played a large part in building his reputation as an exciting and critically challenging narrative voice. It was unsurprising to hear him return to this material. I myself had not had the glorious experience of procreating yet, despite being 24 years in age and eager to not just try for myself the terrifically exciting physiological occurrence that Little Hal had described, but also to contribute to the next generation and to adhere steadfastly to the glorious principles laid out by Fleet Council at the very dawn of the mission.

"Or sometimes," Little Hal was saying, "I'll be in a mood for picking up pieces of deconstituted carbon components from the floor of the rec room and she'll intuit that and suggest we go in there so she can use the Recreational Deconstitution Station. It's uncanny."

"That's neat," I told him. It was not one of his more enjoyable stories and, while I remained a steadfast listener, I was anxious for him to bring it to a conclusion.  I looked around Observation Array III, hoping to notice a different subject for us to discuss and, as my eyes returned to Hannah Sanders, there was a chime from the next room. The next room was the Antenna Room, which was where any transmissions arrived first.

"Probably just another Encouragement Transmission," Hannah Sanders said sleepily.

"Absolutely," I agreed, trying to also sound sleepy.

"I could use some encouragement," she continued. "I'll take a look." She hauled herself up from the monitor and plodded towards the airlock.

"Great idea," I said quickly. "Really constructive idea. I'll come with you." I scurried in behind her to the main comms terminal. Hannah tapped the glowing envelope on the screen and brought up an email which read Comrade, your fortitude is inspiring. You are the vanguard of a glorious future. Your [insert attribute] is [insert compliment]. It has been noticed and appreciated by Fleet Council. Have an enriching work period.

In the lines with square brackets we were supposed to put on our AR frames on to read the unique encouraging sentiment that had been assigned to us. Hannah slipped hers on and smiled. I quickly pulled on mine. "Your dedication to punctual break times is exemplary", it said. I wondered what Hannah Sanders' said.

“What did yours say?” I asked her.

She closed her eyes. “Oh, you know,” she sighed. “Your camera work is clear and tightly focused, enabling algorithms to efficiently parse it for actionable data.”

“That’s good,” I said. “I got one about punctual break times.”

She laughed. “Computers are not good at compliments.”

Encouragement Transmissions didn’t really come from Fleet Council, because even messages from the nearest waypoint took six months to reach us. Let alone bona fide transmissions from Earth, which was 100 light years away, and even simple messages took basically as long as a faster-than-light starship anyway. Encouragement Transmissions were generated by the ship computers using data it gained by observing us. Not that they didn’t feel good sometimes. Especially if they made Hannah Sanders smile at you.

Hannah Sanders, as you may have by now gleaned from my frequent and positive references, was my favourite crewmate aboard the Noble Pursuit. The Noble Pursuit is a just-less-than-faster-than-light starship, 300 metres long from front to back, a miracle of science at the time of its departure. So we were told. For 270 years it had voyaged steadfastly through the cold and dark, beginning with the first generation - our great-great- and then some grandparents - to whom Fleet Council had entrusted the mission of "go out and orbit TOI-700-D and see what (if anything) is there." It comprised: bridge and engine room, dormitories, mess, rec room. There were the Observation Arrays, one of which I worked in (Observation Array III). There were the latrines and the labs. There was the aft pantry, which was off limits since a biological contamination in the second generation. But for us it was quite simply home. A glorious home, although it’s hard to think of a place you have lived for every second of 24 years as glorious. Usually we didn’t even think of it as “home”. A mule doesn’t need a word for a hill.

A couple of others had joined us at the main terminal to enjoy their Encouragement Transmissions. Mason, Gilroy, Rosalia. I nodded warmly at them but did not say hello, in case a verbal greeting initiated a conversation that prevented me from making the short return walk to Observations Array III at the same time as Hannah Sanders.

Aboard the Noble Pursuit there were the five of us - not a usual grouping, I would hasten to add, Gilroy's interests and personality being (steadfastness and dedication to our mission notwithstanding) a little too focused on worshipping the growth in the aft pantry - plus Little Hal and 22 others. We had not yet, in our generation, achieved the glorious aim of a full Crew Of 44, with several attempts at generations having been determined nonviable by key benchmarks.

Comprising our current crew were seven who were approximately my age, one of whom was Hannah Sanders, whom I had played with in creche from the ages of 0-5, then largely ignored from 5-13, then shared notes, ranging in tone from confessional to humorous to spiteful, in class from 14-18, and then from 19 years old been enormously in love with. Seemingly for no reason. No reason other than that one day I had risen from my bunk and looked at her, her dark hair vivid against the entirely white walls of the inside of the Noble Pursuit, beautiful despite having a little crusting of sleep in the corner of both eyes, staring with a faraway look out the window at the stars outside and thought, yes. Not an eloquent thought, for sure. And then after I thought it I spent time going, Huh? “Yes”? until I eventually realised that sometimes “Yes” can be a complete thought, when it was with regards to a beautiful girl. And maybe I’d always been in love with her and I just hadn’t realised it because we’d spent all of our whole lives together, being born only sixteen hours apart.

Almost everyone was born within a month or two of each other. Fleet Council encouraged parents to have their children around the same time as everyone else, and my mother, a steadfast woman named Chief Laboratory Assistant Amy, had been in all things strongly inclined to follow Fleet Council directives, no matter whether the directive was “procreate now” or “sacrifice all in hopes of cleaning out the aft pantry.” And so I had been conceived in adherence with Fleet Council’s recommendations, which ensured that a) all children born would be of procreating age at the same time as their peers, and b) there could be no ill-feeling towards babies etc who cried long into the night or sicked all over the controls or waved gleeful little fists of baby poo around the cabin instead of placing it into organic recycling or demanded to watch the same cartoon one thousand times. If everyone was doing it, no one could begrudge anyone else. And, yes, is the answer, to your question, which I confidently suppose you are harbouring right at this moment, which is would your genes be a good match for Hannah Sanders'. Because my ancestors have not procreated with Hannah Sanders' ancestors since the third generation, which means little or no chance our children will experience genetic misfortunes. And while it is true that Hannah Sanders seems to regard me more as a benign, friend-type character, and save her moony glances for Jake Pendergast, I am confident that any day now my charms will begin to make themselves more apparent. To her. Or anyone else.

(My charms, as I see them: steadfast (obviously); given to noticing details; plus also second tallest, strong keratin growth in hair and fingernails, symmetrical in most facial features; personality which is loving, studious and interested in having fun and enjoyment. Some of these attributes may strike you as unremarkable but, not to activate my own beacon, so to speak, we of the Noble Pursuit are what you might describe as a motley crew, with many of us short and compact, due to the deficiencies of the rations which we have been fed aboard the Noble Pursuit for our whole lives, and also some of us very spindly due to the low gravity, because the conditions affected each of us differently. So it is for us. We do not see ourselves as weird looking. Not necessarily, although at times we make humorous observations at the differences in stature between us. “Hey, Ration Tub.” “Hey yourself, Sensor Array (Long)”. Those are good times. They enrich our days. And occasionally we pull up diagrams of Earth humans on our computer terminals and think to ourselves: these guys were muscly. And stocky. And they looked damn good, some of them, with their muscled legs and stomachs and so on. Buttocks, etc. We still had human instincts, after all. If you know what I’m saying. A few centuries in a starship isn’t going to wipe out a million years of evolution. Anyway.)

At this point Captain Donnie poked his head into the Main Terminal Room and reminded us with his presence of the principles we all strove to embody and we scurried back to Observation Array III. I sat down at my station and consulted the monitors and hashchecks for actionable data. We are at a particularly exciting point in our manifold mission, Captain Donnie had essentially telepathized to us. Need I remind you that with every second we draw nearer to TOI-700-D, the culmination of our glorious endeavour, and as we do so the data we collect becomes more significant. And we therefore must redouble our effort to be steadfast and noticing in all that we do.

It was OK because Captain Donnie was not a hardass and I did not resent him for his sentiment. We were as jazzed as anybody for the next stage of our glorious mission. Each morning, after an hour’s study in which we completed lessons in our Personal Training Modules, which were tailored algorithmically to our specific needs and designed to refresh us on the mission’s core principles of Steadfastness, Noticing Details, Attention to Transmissions and Love Of Our Glorious Mission, we prepared ourselves to Act on Actionable Data. Because, as we were reminded often, much depended on us. Specifically the huge transports full of people just hanging around, orbiting some far off gas giant, deep in coldsleep - big strong first-generationers, ready to be thawed on a fresh new world and plant the flickering flame of humanity with the vigour and virility that we 8th genners might find it hard to drum up, no offense to us. For us it was to us to light the beacon for them to flock to. To run scans and check the error logs in triplicate: such was our task, and we were steadfast about it.

"Get a look at this," Little Hal said. He was staring at his screen, his face right up against it. We gathered around him. We waited for him to tell us what we were looking at, which we could not immediately glean, it being a brown patch of super zoomed-in something and with his face right up against it. "What is it, Hal?" Hannah Sanders asked him. He was absorbed.

"I think it's water," he said slowly.

"No shit?" I said.

"Uh," Hannah Sanders said. "Really, Hal? We've been running tests on TOI-700-D for a while.”

“It is,” Little Hal said slowly. “Look. The dark brown collected in the valley... the flecks of white on the mountaintops nearby. It even looks like a little vapour in the atmosphere.” 

We gathered around him. We were concentrating now. “Have you run a scan on it yet?” Hannah Sanders asked.

“No,” Little Hal said. “I was just scrolling and I saw it.” 

“You should run the scan,” I suggested. 

It took the computer about ten minutes to run a scan as it took different kinds of photos and figured out what they meant. For a few breathless minutes we stood watching the scrolling hashchecks come back Successful, Successful, Successful, watching the status bar tick up. Then Hannah Sanders said, “What else is there? Is there anything nearby?”

Little Hal basically collapsed onto the secondary camera, feverishly jerking the joystick around from the study site. North, then East, then South a bit, to where a red cliff loomed over a low flat plain. Then South, more South, to a basin pockmarked with meteorite craters and, yes, streaked with erosion. We gasped. He hauled the camera to the west to a mountainous area where, in a clearing, strange piles of rock looked so much like buildings. We were flushed and hyperventilating. And then the computer chimed and was done and displaying a box which said it had detected liquid water in the study area with 98% accuracy. We screamed and whooped and shouted for the rest of the crew, and as we did a siren sounded and red and yellow lights flashed. I looked at Hannah and Little Hal, like, Is this what happens when you make a real, bona fide discovery? Sirens? Unexpected but cool. 

We waited for our crewmates to flood into the camera room. I saw Travis Eisenstein lingering in the transmission room and called out to him, “Hey, Trav, in here! Get a load of this!” But he shook his head tersely and pointed at the main terminal. “It’s us!” I shouted. “In here!”

But the group in front of the main terminal swelled. Maybe it was not us. I drifted over.

On the screen was the glowing envelope of a new transmission. It was different from the Encouragement Transmission. The text was bold, for one. It said: URGENT: All hands - EARTH TRANSMISSION.

We’d never had an Earth Transmission before. Not once.

We fell silent as Captain Donnie hauled his way over to the terminal and entered his crew number.

A message flashed up on the screen:

To all hands aboard all stations, shuttles, and deep space exploration vessels:

It is our solemn and infinitely regretful duty to inform you that at 6:15pm UTC this evening, the Earth, our home, was wholly obliterated by a meteor of catastrophic proportions. All life on Earth has been extinguished. Chunks of our former planet have been sent careening into the solar system and beyond.

The Earth’s end was swift. No one stationed planetside was aware of the meteor’s trajectory until minutes before impact. The cataclysmic moment was observed by scientists in Tranquillity City on the Moon.

The solemn responsibility of finding a new home for humanity now lies urgently with you. Godspeed and good luck.

The transmission was signed: Stephanie Caldwell, Secretary-General, Fleet Council, 2 March, 2415.

We counted. 

“260 years ago,” Jill Sanders said.

“Just after we left,” Captain Donnie said.

Donnie gave us the rest of the day off. “Just, uh, take it easy,” he said. “Relax. Whatever. It’s all... well, we’ve all had a kind of an interesting... it’s been a surprising day, I guess.” He was not given to public speaking.

In all honesty, when I heard the news I was like - well, OK. That sucks. Because if we haven’t been sending this data back to Earth then where have we been sending it? Has our steadfast work running the tests been for nothing? Has our mission been, rather than glorious, one of the utmost futility? Has our single-minded effort to notice actionable data been in vain. And so on. But then I realised - it’s been intercepted by other Fleet Council outposts, obviously. Which meant that our work had still been valuable. And, actually, even more valuable than ever, because for all we knew none of the deep space recon missions had turned up anything useful, whereas we had found TOI-700-D which maybe had water and might have even had some old buildings from an extinct alien civilisation, which was very cool to think about now that I was articulating it to myself. 

I looked at Hannah Sanders to see how she was taking the news. Not good. Tears streaming, eyes red. I ducked my head to smile commiseratively at her and she smiled back but it was obviously just an acknowledgement smile. 

Charles Yeun suggested that we all meet outside the aft pantry to deliver the news to the growth. “Perhaps at last,” he announced pompously, “she shall be satisfied.”

A few drifted off to the aft pantry. Most of us returned to our bunks for contemplation. I use “us” in the sense of the crew at large. Hannah Sanders and Little Hal and I returned to Observation Array III. 

“It’s the wrong time,” Little Hal hissed. “It’s disrespectful.”

“No,” I told him firmly. “Now, more than ever, people need to know that there is a real and concrete hope for a new home for humanity. Look around. Everyone’s bummed out. They’re at an all time low. If we tell them about our discovery it’ll give them something nice to think about.”

“Gosh,” Hannah Sanders snapped. “There’s no point trying to cheer them up. They’re upset because every training video they’ve ever watched has been Earth this, Earth that. Notice, notice, notice. Plant the beacon. There’s no flickering flame left. If we tell them now they’re just going to get mad at us. They want to cry.”

I looked at her with tears in my eyes. She was so perceptive as well as beautiful. Her nostrils were flared and her hair askew. “I know,” I told her. “But I think we should tell them anyway. In case someone goes for the airlock again.”

I don’t know what I was expecting. I wanted her so much to like me. I hadn’t had many experiences. Exercise, work on the computer, contemplation of glorious mission, rigorous discussion with parental figure (Chief Laboratory Assistant Amy), resentment (at growth in aft pantry), play in the rec room, pity (for Little Hal), curiosity (at space’s vast expanse). I had experienced longing. I wanted to sample the experience of being loved by Hannah Sanders in return, for the validation, sure, of course, but also for the mystery and depth of crawling into a cramped bunk with another person and discovering new corners of yourself as you discover them. That was the kind of discovery I wanted. Each day we began our shift with a vague and dull hope of discovering the basics of life. The hashchecks would not, if you will excuse a little melodrama, reveal anything of greater beauty. And to learn that the ancient rock on which our ancestors had toiled in misery had been turned into space junk? It was, no offense to our ancestors, interesting. It was information. With all due respect. It was a fact on a screen. Our first generation ancestors were kind of a big deal, with the stories and so on that had been passed down from them acquiring a certain epicness of scale as time passed. They would have thought this was a tragedy. But a realer tragedy, in my opinion, was to count down your days so close to something so perfect that was just out of reach. Every night as I fell asleep I sensed just beyond my grasp that miraculous dimension just waiting for another person - this person - could open for me. Once I had tried to explain my theory to Little Hal and he had looked at me with such pity I’d tried to forget it forever.

I stared gloomily out into black space. You could imagine the pitch to Earth recruits. Explore the stars, further humanity and, oh, have children and grandchildren so the starship doesn't run out of crew before you reach TOI-700. Pretty enticing. You couldn't blame the first generation for their decision. They'd lived on Earth, after all, which did not sound at all like a picnic, from the way Chief Laboratory Assistant Amy and her mother had told the stories that great-grandmother etc had told them, with the wide and terrifying outdoors and million-strong throngs and enormous amount of choices to make. The idea of living in a cosy little starship with 40-odd others, with nothing to do but secure humanity's future among the stars and do a little procreating on the way, must have sounded pretty darn ideal. Sure the food you’ll eat will be synthesised from poo. Sure the windows may as well not be windows if all they’re ever going to show is black with white dots. Sure there’ll be some odd bods who go bonkers because all the Personal Training Modules in the universe can’t help them sublimate their instinct to climb a tree into something productive and they try and override the airlock and the first officer has to subdue them. And then they end up hanging themselves in solitary. Jesus. Maybe you’ll get wiped out by a vicious strangling tendril that emerges from the aft pantry and certain superstitiously-minded crewmembers will speculate that you were an offering to appease an evil alien presence and that other offerings will be necessary.

But also: maybe if you’re the kind of dreamer who packs up and ships out like that you don’t game any of it out or spend too long thinking about how your children and grandchildren etc will take the news of, Hey, you basically have to live out the years of your precious existence in a box. 

Jill Sanders knocked hesitantly on the bulkhead and came in to comfort Hannah. She nodded at Little Hal and me in commiseration. “They sent some photos to Donnie,” she said quietly. 

I gawked at her. “Donnie gets private messages?” I said. 

She told us about the photos taken from a space station floating among the rings of Saturn, the icy corona of all of the oceans’ water spearing away into space, the fragments of Africa and the Urals spinning lazily off into the black, closing slowly in on the tiny transports that were attempting to evacuate Tranquillity City. Detritus raining down with steady inevitability on the Martian atmosphere. Smashing through the thin gas down onto the weak domes of the fledgling settlements. Plumes of frozen oxygen and nitrogen forming mini nebulas where Earth had once hung, tiny and fragile and long dead. One rock among trillions. “In a way,” she sighed, “We’re lucky.” Silently I waited for Hannah Sanders and Little Hal to give her the good news. 

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