“Spaceship, spaceship
what you are
how i wonder
how much far....”
Not that much farther. Now the destination planet was in view and Ellie let herself feel hopeful for the first time in years. She was in her mid fifties. Thin and delicate from never experiencing earth’s gravity and from rationing all of the food that she had left. Recycling, re-using, sleeping as much as possible to minimize her calorie intake.
She knew that her parents bodies were fed back into the nutrition producing units just like her urine, feces and nail clippings but...she didn’t like to think about that. She also didn’t like to think about her mother and father’s disembodied reproductive organs maintained in stasis - necessary to give the human race another chance at life. They were replicated and added to, with every biological cell that Ellie could spare. She knew that she would never know romantic love, never know sex, but in this way she could be a mother.
And now the planet was in sight, time to think about the next steps.
“Keep our race going,” her father, had said to her over and over. It was no secret that he and Ellie’s mother, would not make it to see the new planet. That had been the original plan when the survivor ship had set out from earth all those years ago. Give birth to the first new generation aboard the ship which should be able to reproduce on the new planet. Long after the first ones had perished.
The shipwreck, however, had cost them years.
Ellie’s birth had weakened her mother so much that she had never fully recovered. Ellie remembered feeling her mother's bones when she snuggled into her. She was always worried that if she squeezed her too hard, her mother would break. Not far from the truth. Zero-g was not kind to human bodies. The original ship had controls built in to mitigate this effect but the modified escape pod - not meant for long term travel - was not thus endowed.
Her parents had done their best, despite the hand that they were dealt.
The last survivors of a colony ship. They had only lived because they were bringing about Ellie’s existence in an escape pod when an object, probably an asteroid - “the size of a baseball” said her father, gesturing while Ellie nodded - had impacted the ship.
He had tried to explain baseball to her several times but she just did not get it until he had crumpled up a piece of paper and rolled another piece of paper into a tube.
“Now’s here the pitch!” he had said, excitedly tossed the ball towards her in slow motion. “Now swing!” and she had swung, hitting it dead on and sending it flying in a prolonged arc towards the ceiling. It was an excruciatingly sluggish game and Ellie just had not taken to it.
“It’s more fun with gravity” he had pouted.
“Sure,” thought Ellie while she smiled indulgently, “just like everything else.”
The asteroid the size of a baseball had punched a hole in the ships hull, sucking all the oxygen out. It had rammed through all of the decks causing explosions and then escaped out of the other side. The 4,998 survivors, dead. Ellie’s parents were the only ones who had made it out alive. The escape pod had detached almost immediately and there was simply nothing they could do.
She knew that both of her parents had still suffered from nightmares of salvaging what they could from the burned and broken wreckage. Pushing aside the bodies of their family and friends to get anything to help them survive and modifying the escape pod to make the long journey. They had even gone back for some of their comrade’s bodies, knowing that they would need the biological resources if they were to survive.
Now that Ellie had passed the yellow neighboring planet, it hung like a millennia old pregnant belly behind her. Full of life and ready to give. She thought briefly of telling her children that the neighboring planet was a goddess of fertility, but she thought better of it. From what her parents had told her of earth, religion was less than helpful for progressing the species. She took one last look at the radiant sight and focused her attentions on the planet ahead.
All of the scans of the planet were coming back positively. Good air, mostly herbivorous life forms and the food should be just fine. Once she was able to send a drone down to collect samples, they would be added to the growth serum used for the developing fetuses. That way they would be sure to harbor any immunities and enzymes necessary to break down the native food.
Bad news for her as far as the gravity went, though, there was no way she could survive down there. She would have to wear a pressure suit with a built in exoskeleton to compensate. The gravity would crush her to a bloody sac of meat otherwise. Disallow her organs from functioning and explode her cells.
She could get the first round of children started and then she would have to leave. Come back up here to sleep and awaken every few years to check in. Doing this, she estimated, she could keep an eye on them for the next 200 or so years. Longer if she was able to integrate the planets food into her diet successfully and had to awaken from sleep less and less.
Sighing she pushed herself away from the controls. It was time to start incubating the first of the new generation. She floated down the hall and made her way into the reproduction room. The wombs that had been replicated from her mothers stood in their individual tanks. She knew that much of the water and tissue that her mother had left behind after her death had gone into making these. Sometimes Ellie wondered if her mother was still there, caught between worlds, in hell.
She pushed that thought away and went to the cryo-chamber where individual eggs, sperm, and fertilized eggs were stored. The careful joining and naming of these had been therapeutic for her mother. She had made sure to select for diversity. Between her and her father, almost all of the earth-original skin tones, eye colors, and hair types were accounted for.
“Make sure they know that they are all the same on the inside” her mother had said, over and over. “Let’s not set up another shit show like the one on earth.”
As long as there was adequate nutrition, each womb should be able to accommodate triplets but Ellie wanted to start small, make sure that the babies would turn out ok. Also having the first generation partially grown to take care of later generations would be very helpful especially given her state.
She reached for the first fertilized egg.
“Looks like you’re up, Adam.”
