The First Captain looked at the screen, the feed from the outside camera showing the moon beneath them. Earth was only a quarter million kilometers away, but in terms of cost of resources it might as well have been one of the Jovian moons. The entire settlement effort of his group was stressed for funding, so they couldn’t afford to waste money getting supplies from Earth when lunar goods were 90% as good and less than half the cost.

He was called the First Captain because of a peculiarity within the mission’s charter. It held that, to prevent anyone from abusing any position of authority, all official positions which held power of decision over others were to be filled at random from a pool of all who were qualified and who wanted the position. Civilian endeavors were exempt from this, of course, but there was little in the way of civilian endeavors on a ship like this where every gram of matter was recycled the second it was no longer needed. A few service industries at most existed, and most of those had a parallel in the ship’s crew, like how the ship had official hair dressers, but some people also cut hair when off duty.

Furthermore, all people in positions of power must understand the roles of the people they were in power over so far as that power extended. A manager at a restaurant couldn’t be trusted to oversee the kitchen unless they had worked in one, doing everything from cooking to washing dishes.

For this reason, Captain Johanes currently had the secondary role of navigator. Any time he wasn’t acting as Captain he was expected to plot one of a series of increasingly difficult paths for the ship with increasingly more restrictions on performance like maximum G forges experienced or maximum engine burn rate.

They had know what the statistics of their ship would be for years, and those statistics had been worked into simulations which anyone on the ship could access. While he was currently at a physical control simulator, one could just as easily study in VR. Physical controls were needed, however, for the simple fact that they were easier to build and repair. The ship needed to be repaired and more ships would need to be built, if not here then at Trappist-1. And habitats which were built on planets would be based on the same technology which the ship used.

This meant that the ship had to be built to be as robust as possible, using simple systems which could be made onboard if possible. Few components came in from off world and as the various factories were built onboard that number rapidly decreased. They would need to make everything themselves once they launched, after all. No human settlement could be reliant on shipments from other star systems, so they would have to learn to make do with only what they could make themselves. If they could only construct the primitive computer processors of the 1980s, then they would have to base their technology aboard the ship on those primitive processors. Luckily, though, they could currently make computer processors on par with the single board computers of the late 2020s, so they could at least run basic VR programs on their own hardware.

In System colonies occasionally tried to rely on shipments for other worlds, of course. The data farms of Io, for example, ordered all of their processors and data storage from Mars, where the chips were more energy efficient than the Earth made models, thus further increasing their operating efficiency. That, however, only made the chips prohibitively expensive. The colony at Proxima Centauri, however, made everything on its own, other than a handful of luxury goods which were shipped in with the waves of colonists, and exported scientific data from the first extra-solar colony and the closest extra-solar location with alien life.

People were the one thing that couldn’t be sent as data. Any technology could be sent as an encrypted file, and factories opened in that location by agents or partners of the one that sent the data. The complete genome of all known alien lifeforms as well as all of the data on them and their environment, likewise could be transmitted via the massive transceiver array built in orbit of Sol, the various colonies, or their suns. Humans, on the other hand, weren’t fully understood and therefore couldn’t be fully transferred. Neural patterns could, of course, be recorded, and would be used to repair the memories of anyone that was brain damaged once the stem cells had replaced the damaged cells with new ones, but that only worked on an established mind. Each brain seemed to encode memories in a subtly different way which established itself in early childhood, and two different people, even identical twins, will have two different ways of encoding memories, like different fingerprints.

This was known in the early development of the brain-machine interfaces. Attempts to transfer memories between identical twins almost always failed, and when they succeeded only vague details actually transferred. Similar attempts had been made once Mars was colonized, as they bucked tradition and allowed human cloning for reproductive purposes. Attempts to transfer a father or mother’s memories into their genetically identical son or daughter were made, but they were even less successful than the experiments with twins. So the technology hit a wall which it couldn’t move past, and true memory transfers never became possible. One day, perhaps, someone would discover a way to figure out exactly how each brain encoded memories, and that data could be used to make a clone who could accept the memories of the original, but that day was likely hundreds of years away. First Captain Johanes might even see it, as the travel time to the Trappist-1 system would take over four hundred years.

Computers could, of course, interface with the brain in some ways, namely the various input and output circuits that were already built in. After all, an eye was virtually identical in function no matter who it came from, so, assuming you got the neural connections correct, you could transfer an eye from a donor to another person. Not that that was ever used in modern times. Tissue cloning was a well established medical field, and one could have replacement organs grown from their own cells or cloned cells at any point, then installed in the place of other tissue. It was the technology or interfacing the brain and computers via external senses that prosthetic limbs and VR technology relied on to give people realistic experiences with the technology in question.

Johanes had a cable plugged into the back of his head. He wasn’t, however, directly interfacing with the simulator. Instead, he was interfacing with a learning device called the Impressionator. While memory transfer was impossible, the brain was mapped out well enough that a concept could be directly impressed onto the brain as a whole, along with the most basic concepts associated with it. For example, a small child might have the concept of Addition impressed on their brain, then, after an adult explain the basic concept by “adding” one toy to a group of two, the child might understand the concept well enough that questions like “what is two plus two” might make sense to them. They will find themselves knowing the answer even if they don’t know HOW they know the answer. It is this technology which gives everyone on board, and many people on the various colonies in the solar system, the ability to understand a large number of things on a practical level, but know none of the theory behind it and have no personal memories of the topic.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

It wasn’t widely used on other worlds because the people found the idea of knowing without knowing how you knew too unsettling, but on the Trappist Traveler it was a necessity because of their charter, at least as far as the senior staff were concerned. The others used it as well due to the prevailing idea that everyone should be competent at everything, even if you hated it. This meant that many of the crew were attempting to learn every job on the ship, and the number of people that were doing that was only increasing as they brought more people aboard.

The ship could only hold some twenty thousand awake people, and before setting out most of them would be placed in cryonics, where all bodily functions would stop and they would technically be dead, but which would leave their body in a condition where it could be repaired even if they were frozen for a thousand years.

Johanes’s position of Captain was, of course, preliminary, as he wasn’t yet qualified to do the job according to the group’s charter, but that would be remedied before they launched. In fact, every position of power on the ship would need to have at least one qualified person who signed up for the role and was qualified to do it before they launched, and the general rules specified that at least three people be qualified and willing to fulfill every position on the ship for the sake of redundancy, and that every position of power be assigned for a random two to four year period. That is why he was called the First Captain, because no matter how much he might want to be captain, he would have at least two others who would also hold the position, taking turns with him while every officer underneath them was also randomly being replaced by at least two others.

He finished programming the tricky maneuver between the two stars of Alpha Centauri and the slingshot around one of the planets and activated the simulation, watching the simulated ship follow the course out from between the two stars and on course for Proxima. He knew that the next one would have him do something similar, but be on a course to go into orbit of Proxima C, and decided to take a break before tackling it.

He got up and made his way to the cafeteria. It was approximately 21:20 ship’s time, and he knew that the last of the supper rush would be ending, but if he hurried he might be able to get a cup of coffee and slice of pie before they cleaned everything up and before he had to go back to his lessons. He only had three more to go, and once he finished he could move onto a more interesting field of study. Maybe he could try his hand at cloning meat in the grow lab. He hadn’t learned to do that yet, but it sounded interesting.

The ship had restaurants, of course. They got priority on all food that was produced, and the cafeteria got second priority, with everything that was left over going to the Food Preservation section so that it could be freeze dried. But they were in orbit, which meant that the Captain could spend his money on Luna, including shipping things in, so he went to the free cafeteria as much as he could rather than to the paid restaurants. And he preferred the media subscriptions that he could download all of his favorite shows from to eating out every day anyway. A ship like this didn’t have a special dining area for the Captain or officers, after all, as that would just serve to separate the supervisors from the supervised. So he had the same choice as all the crew, even if he got paid five times what a standard recruit would.

After getting his coffee and a slice of blueberry pie, the berries picked in one of the ship’s parks, he found a seat across from another senior officer and sat down. He maneuvered around the tables as it felt natural to do, approaching slowly, getting close as he walked around them, then speeding up a bit as he walked away. When he got to the table she looked at him for a few seconds before realizing what he had done and reaching over to turn off the box on his waist. “Sorry. Forgot to turn off my Impressionator. I was still thinking in terms of orbital mechanics.” She was eating ice cream, the cream for which was manufactured in a cloning facility from artificial mammory glands, which were grown from cow DNA the same way the meat from the hamburgers were grown. It was only slightly more difficult to grow a functioning gland compared to a semi-functional muscle.

Dorian Clement was a tall woman from somewhere in the north eastern part of the United States district of Earth. She refused to tell anyone where exactly, or exactly how old she was. Thanks to life extension the last question didn’t much matter. Like most of the adults onboard, the stem cell treatments and hormone injections kept her looking like she was in her early thirties. No one onboard looked to be more than forty, and that usually from hard living. Once they launched and the stress they were under greatly decreased most of the staff would look to be in their late twenties, with only a few in their mid thirties.

He knew she was much older than that, however, as she had once told him that she had her first daughter at the age of sixty two. She had talked of at least four different children, and he knew she had grandchildren as well, though if her children waited like she did before having children of their own she could be well over a hundred years old, maybe even two hundred. But here in the late twenty third century that was the norm.

“So, I hear your youngest granddaughter is getting married. Some Martian?” he said, starting the conversation.

She nodded. “Yep. They’ll be having the ceremony at a small temple on Deimos in nine days.” The Martians had created some sort of religion based around the veneration of the planet as a deity, one that they served by bringing life to it. The captain was sure that it was nonsense, but the religious rights of others had to be respected even if you didn’t agree with their views.

“You didn’t take off to go to the wedding?”

She shrugged. “I’ve been to over three dozen weddings of my grandchildren, and over a dozen for the great grandkids. I’ve had my fill of weddings.” She ate the last bite of icecream and pushed her bowl to the side. “I do have something job related to talk about, though, Jerry.” She had been his first officer on three round trips to the Jovian moons so far, two hauling scientists and their families to Europa to study the primitive life there and one hauling frozen colonists to the mining cities of Ganymede. He had even recruited her for this mission because of that, even if he was currently assigned a different first officer, one that had served in the Space Forces and mostly hunted pirates in the asteroid belt. “It’s about the budget.”

“Since when were you interested in the budget?” he joked.

She smirked. “Well I was doing my Accountant training this morning and found out that Steve, the main guy in the accounting department, was getting a bit behind. So I volunteered to help him. Anyway, he was complaining about price increases and mentioned that hydrogen had went from 149 credits per ton to 157 credits per ton. That means that the fuel will cost us over 150 million more. And the budget is too tight to really handle it. That’s why we haven’t already filled up the tanks. They are already built, after all.”

The ship would weigh something like half a million tons when it was finished and fully stocked, not counting fuel. The engine had an exhaust velocity of 15000 km/s. This meant that the ship would require over twenty seven megatons of hydrogen to get up to its cruising speed of 10% the speed of light and slow down from that speed when they got where they were going. They had little use for any excess fuel, as the ship’s power came from solar panels while it was in orbit and would come from nuclear fission once they got out past Jupiter, where the sun was too dim to meet their needs. Fusion reactors that could fit into the ship and produce as much as the fission reactor just didn’t exist yet, and fission power was far easier to repair. Besides, one didn’t want to cut corners with something as important as fuel. That was why they hadn’t recalculated the fuel reserves when the engineers promised a moderate increase in the exhaust velocity of a few percent. It was also why they were oversizing the tanks a bit and hauling thirty megatons instead. Better to arrive in the system with an extra megaton of fuel than enter the system with a ton too little. All of this meant that almost half of their budget would be taken up by fuel, though. And a price increase would only increase that percentage.

“You want me to call the vendor? They have an office in Shackleton City. I can try and negotiate for a bulk purchase rate.”

“You should probably leave that to the quartermaster. You might be good at handling people, but you are terrible with financial negotiations. I just thought you should know.” She got up to take the plastic dishes to the cleaning area. “Well, I’ll talk to you later. I’m going to bed.”

“Good night, then. I have a few hours left to finish my navigation training.” He said goodbye and went back to his pie.