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I stood in the receiving bay of Neptune Station staring at the imposing ship floating just outside the viewing port. It was not a beautiful ship. It was hulking and grey, nearly devoid of anything worth looking at. A scant handful of viewports just like the one I was staring through dotted one section of the hull. Swathes of carbon-coated aluminum dotted with bolts and brackets wrapped around the ovaloid vessel, roughly the size of a five-story building. It was a great grey space egg.
“I always though space ships were supposed to be sleek and aerodynamic.” I mused.
“You’ve watched way too much sci-fi, Cory. There’s no air in space to have to worry about aerodynamics. We don’t fly in space. We jump through it. That thing could be a cube the size of Jupiter and it would still travel through space just as efficiently,” Michelle Gutierrez explained from my left. She was staring at the space egg through her own viewing port.
I leaned over to look through her window wondering if, perhaps, there might be something more interesting to look at. Just at the edge of what Michelle’s view port could see was the tail end of the ship’s name, painted in broad, prosaic text. AESF Lobotomy. But only -TOMY was visible from our vantage point. I chuckled for the 437th time at the ship’s name. Such a stupid name for a space egg.
The AESF Lobotomy was one of a small fleet of egg-shaped ships equipped with jump drives built and commanded by the Allied Earth Space Force. Small meaning just four ships. The AESF Lobotomy, the AESF Pentobarbitol, the AESF Winchester, and the AESF Joules.
Jump drives mean they can travel approximately one light year per second. Places in the galaxy that were once only barely visible through ultra-powerful telescopes could be reached in a matter of seconds. I once tried to look up how jump drives work and why all the ships that use them are oval but my brain started to physically hurt trying to understand that. I gave up and just happily accept that space eggs can go from Neptune Station to a planet orbiting Barnard’s star in six seconds instead of thousands of years.
Since settling the moon and renaming it Moonland, humans have been pushing our boundaries of inhabitance further and further away from the planet of our origin. When we discovered that we could produce jump drives using a cold fusion process we can only safely perform on Neptune, the universe simultaneously got a lot smaller and a lot bigger all at once.
It had only been fifty Terrasol years since Colonel Adam Wainwright became the first human to leave our solar system and return. The following year Colonel Beatrice Abega left our solar system and came back alive. Colonel Wainwright encountered just a tiny bit of an oxygen-supply consuming fire while out past the dwarf planet Eris. But his flight and subsequent death proved that the auto-pilot technology was perfectly functional as the ship managed to make its way back to Neptune Station, a very crispy astronaut still on-board. A mere eight-years after that and we officially settled our first extra-galaxial colony. And what did we do with that first colony? We shipped every single criminal, political prisoner, low-life, and miscreant to it.
Dubbed New Australia, although AESF swears that’s not the colony’s name, it was decided by someone with more power than brains that the general populations of Earth, Moonland, Mars, and Neptune Station would not trust extra-galaxial colonies seeing as jump drives solved the travel portion of the equation but communication was still slow. Impossibly slow. Messages still took hundreds of years to pass between Earth and any place beyond the reach of our com-sat network. Turns out Starlink is a bit of a misnomer as it cannot actually send messages between stars. The only way for a colony outside our solar system to communicate with anyone inside our solar system was to wait for a jump drive ship to arrive, upload your message, and let it carry it back. Jump drives were miraculous bits of brain-hurting science, but they still cost the wealth of a mid-size nation to operate. They could jump between points of our universe in moments but they also took two years to turn on.
Literally, once a ship uses the jump drive, it is stuck where it lands for two years. We have four of those ships so there is one jump per year from Earth and one jump per year from Primum Unus, the official name of the Earth’s first extra-galaxial colony. Translated from Latin as First One, the official colony name is so incredibly inane, everyone refuses to call it that. Even the news outlets stopped using its official name citing it’s too stupid for an entire planet to name the first one of something “First One.”
Anyway, in order to prove that you could, in fact, safely live in a galaxy far, far away even if your Facebook posts wouldn’t be read by anyone on Earth, those brainless powers looked to the British Imperial days for inspiration. For a while, anyone who did a bad in 18th or 19th century Britain or any of it’s colonies would be sentenced to “Transportation,” meaning bustled on to a boat, shipped like cargo to Australia, and dumped there with a “Best of luck” as the ship sailed back to civilization. If you survived, good on ya. Same principle, but the criminals were being moved much further away. Much, much further away. Hence, we named that planet New Australia and filled it with the people who don’t play nice with the other people.
And I had just taken a job to move in with them all. Technically I’d taken a job on the ship that transported them. The jump happened in seconds but those two years the ship sat at its destination actually required people do stuff to turn those impossibly complicated drives back on to make the jump again. And all those people needed things like food and clean clothes and operational tools to do that. That’s where I come in. I am a chef. I am a very broke chef. I make a mean Beef Wellington but don’t understand jump drives or budgeting. One two-year sojourn to New Australia, cooking for people who are just grateful to not cook for themselves and I get more money deposited into my bank account than I could earn in twenty years working as a chef on Earth. Yeah. I’m getting on the space egg with the bad men in their boxes and cooking for people who need two years to turn that same space egg around and bring it back home.
My new aerodynamics-expert friend was also joining the crew of the AESF Lobotomy this mission although she did way cooler things than make stroganoff. She was a jump drive engineer. Technically her title was not jump drive engineer but after the fifth time she told me the full scope of what she does and the fifth time I failed to understand, we both agreed I could just call her a jump drive engineer.
“What’s funny?” Michelle’s tone was not at all accusatory but genuinely curious.
“The AESF Lobotomy. It’s just such…it’s almost offensive to have named ships we use to transport criminals after old styles of capital punishment and execution methods.”
“I think it’s apt, personally.” Michelle replied casually. “We move criminals far from humans who they might hurt but do not remove their humanity. They can be as lawless as they want or they can set up a new life in a new place and start over, a slate so fresh it might as well be a rebirth. It’s up to them how they behave and what they do on New Australia. I sleep easier knowing they have their own planet and we have ours. This is a far better solution than lobotomies, lethal injection, firing squads, or electric chairs after which the ships were named.” I said nothing as I honestly didn’t know if I agreed with her or not. I’d only taken this job because if I didn’t figure out how to pay my bills, I was at risk of becoming a passenger on one of these boats rather than a crew member.
It turns out it’s much easier to get convicted of a crime when there was profit to be made by shipping new, willing bodies to New Australia. Many of those willing bodies would be looking for something to do upon their arrival and a handful of companies set up shop across the universe to offer the criminals jobs. You didn’t have to work for those companies but most folks ended up doing so for a least a little while. Instead, not prepared to wrestle with that bit of existential dread, I just looked back out the window to my new space-egg home and sighed. I hoped they’d managed to get tomatoes added to the manifest. I was feeling on some marinara when we got to where we were going.
I would love to read a continuation of this.
Good story. Thanks.