One day I made a completely reckless plan involving a food crate, some scrap, an environment suit, and a full engineers toolkit. What is this plan for? Why, to stowaway aboard the first interstellar starship of course! I simply placed myself into the crate, welded it closed with me and other materials inside, and voila, the workers did the rest of the heavy work. I, of course needed to get out before the I was busted by the final inspection so I stealthily slipped myself out of the crate, and hid inside the crawl space for the fourth redundant reactor of the ship.
They built the ship, called the SUH Asteria, out of Mars’ moon Deimos using materials taken from both the excavated interior of the poor moon and various pieces from it’s brother moon Phobos. The ship in it’s fully completed state is a cylinder that reaches a total length of 2.5 kilometers and a diameter of .7 kilometers. Most of that space is taken up by the living section which is a cylinder of 2 by .7 kilometers that has a small town built on the inside walls. Of course this cylinder is spinning to create an artificial gravity effect. The total initial population of the ship is 501. The last 1 is of course me, the stowaway.
Luckily I as a part of the initial design team, before they kicked me out, I was very familiar with the various bits and bobs of the ship’s construction. The miraculous ship had a maximum capacity of 2000 persons before the ship no longer became self sufficient. To make it short, having little me on the ship has no noticeable impact. I look forward to be a little bit tricksy during this trip to relieve my boredom.
As you can imagine, sitting around near a constantly pulsing antimatter-matter annihilation reaction will shave a couple of years off your life. Even if the reaction is shielded, only sitting a foot away made sure that I was still bombarded with gamma radiation for a solid week. Luckily, the anti radiation coating of my environment suit worked pretty well so I should still be able to live to the age of 500.
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The wonders of nanites become clear when you look at the average life expectancy on Mars after their introduction to the population on Earth in 2030. Most people are able to live to at least 800 years, and some people (usually the wealthy) are able to get a “reintroduction” at regular periods, allowing their lifespans to increase beyond 1000 years. In fact the inventor of the nanites still hasn’t kicked the bucket, even after nearly 1300 years have passed.
I am currently cramped up in the crawlspace and feeling unbelievably uncomfortable. Not only am I stuffed inside a crawlspace with barely enough space to fully extend my arm, I am realizing that I forgot to take off my undershirt. The residual heat from the reactor was causing me to sweat rivers on the inside of my suit.
I decided to try and find a spot that’s a little bit cooler so I start maneuvering deeper into the crawlspace. “F***!” I hold my hand with tears in my eyes as the suit neutralizes the extreme heat that my hand just encountered. I look at the panel that clearly said DO NOT TOUCH in bold red letters and give it the finger using my currently non injured hand.
After some time I finally find a section that seems close to the coolant and the surrounding temperature instantly drops to a much more manageable level. I hook myself to the wall and relax my body. I take a gander at my suit’s nutrient supply and nod with satisfaction when I see about two weeks worth of compressed nutrient fluid remaining.
A week passes by with only a few more embarrassing moments involving the DANGER panel as well as a couple of incidents where I almost got myself stuck when for some reason I decided to make an attempt to turn around inside the cramped crawlspace.
After the “grace period” that I had set to myself of one week, I crawl out of the reactor crawlspace that had become my home. I take a look around the engineering section. The space housing the four reactors, each taking up a volume of 100 square meters, is pretty cramped and because walkways become useless after the initial acceleration of the ship is finished, the space is completely covered in handlebars, mooring points, and cables attached throughout the room.
I take out my leftover scrap and fashion a small cubicle on the least conspicuous area of the reactor room. Soon a small 2 by 2 meter space is isolated from the surrounding area in between reactors two and four. This cubicle shall be my base of operations until I can find a better spot. I strap myself to the wall and settle down for some rest. When I wake up, I guess I should secure myself a steady food source, starving to death does not sound appealing.