On Distant Worlds: The Prologues & Colibri. Brian Gonzalez
work is nasty or not, but we assume it is because it sounds nasty). So it’s not an escape pod for the rich. It’s hell for the rich.
#6: The “PreFab Colonies” Are Already Built
You doons can make whatever choices you like, but we here at Cataclysm Humor would not care to ride down to the surface of an unknown alien planet on rubber O-rings that had been kept at low temperatures for, oh let’s say four hundred fucking years [BlinkLink Challenger Disaster] and we think the actual colonists will feel similarly not stupid as shit.
The shuttles and colony structures are predesigned but will be built from raw materials on the way so that they are new and trustworthy when they are used.
#5: It’ll be Like Working in a Submarine Your Whole Life
We’d love to see the submarine that includes schools, concert halls, zoos, low-gravity swimming pools and gyms, parks, wingflight facilities, sports arenas, hospitals, an artificial mountain to climb, and the ability to make its own smaller submarines. We’d love to see that submarine so much we’re going to go out and look for it right now. And when we find it we’re going to kill the people who have it and take it for ourselves. Then we will quit working at Cataclysm Humor.
#4: It Will Be a Police State
Everything is a police state. That stipulated, the civilians will govern and police themselves. Authority cop/soldiers (or as we like to call them, Pigtroops) will only have jurisdiction in civilian areas insofar as the safety of the BioShip itself is concerned. Say you tried to set off an incendiary bomb in a civilian area. A civilian cop or an Authority Pigtroop could arrest you. But say you stripped yourself naked, slathered hot sauce on your member, violated a copyright, put laxatives in the water supply and then performed a human sacrifice in front of a squad of Pigtroops in a civilian area. The Pigtroops could not arrest you. They could conceivably squeal and wallow in their own filth and perhaps even throw excrement at you. But they could not arrest you.
#3: It’s Made Out of Ice
It’s a starship. It’s made out of metal and plastic and ceramics.
The hull of the BioShip is the part you could chisel at to chill down your Pomegranetini. Theoretically. But you wouldn’t really want to do it because it’s not just ice. It’s ice blended with the raw materials the ship will need in the future. Metals, minerals, chemicals; lots of stuff and some of it pretty poisonous.
But – stay with us here – if you were to tunnel down through dozens or even hundreds of meters of ice (depending on location) and managed to get to the inner layer of the outer hull… that part actually is pure ice. They don’t want the ice-resources blend next to the Habitation Lobes. The pure ice layer prevents cadmium poisoning or whatnot. In fact they plan to farm the ice. So if you took some for your Santa Margarita you would be arrested, possibly by cops, or more likely by angrily snorting Pigtroops.
#2: It’s Code-Named the Ice-Ship
It just sounds like “Ice-Ship”. It’s actually “I-Ship”. “I” as in “interstellar”. “I” as in “incredibly stupid mistake”. “I” as in “Interestingly, I am filling up with generalized rage”. “I” as in “I just want you to shut the fuck up now”.
#1: It Won’t Work
Of course it’ll work. Lots of smart, well-trained people with all the resources and energy they could possibly need will be running this. The most brilliant minds of the last two generations planned it. Why wouldn’t it work? Of course it’ll work. The question is: how long will it work? Will it work long enough to sidestep the Cataclysm and find us new homes, traveling light-years away over hundreds of years? Or will it work only long enough to kill all the passengers in slow misery? Nobody knows. But one way or another, when they hit the switch, something will happen.
Next time: What if the Cataclysm advertised? (Reader Contest Results)
And remember, we’re all dead soon so shut the fuck up.
Jennifer Antonov
c. 2181 C.E.
Today was the third day in a row they had been forced to break camp before 0500 hours.
The first Enemy hoots had sounded less than an hour ago and already the humans were hundreds of meters away from last night’s camp, hacking new trail through a gentle downslope of spiraled yellowish grasses and dark purple frond-plants with meter-wide stellate leaves and tough, woody stalks as thick as her thigh. It was tough going and Jennifer would have given anything for a fully powered cutter. A flick of the switch, a tang of ozone, and ugly foliage would have parted before her like she was the extraterrestrial female Moses. But cutters belonged to the past. Like Saturday night dances and access to the Net. There were only three energy cells left and they would be needed in the future. Machetes and the blisters that went along with them were all the rage these days. The technology has to match the times.
They had broken camp in about twenty minutes today, but she wasn’t sure whether that was because forcefully imposed practice was making them more efficient or whether the losses they had taken in the last week made the camp that much simpler to break down. They were down to twenty-two people now, and three of those injured badly enough they couldn’t blaze trail or patrol. But you couldn’t fight a moving siege through unknown terrain without casualties. The Last Standers were dwindling fast.
Under ordinary conditions it would have been easy to outpace the poorly organized Enemy pursuit. But the specific nature of their mission made that impossible.
Half a klick behind them, a short, flat report sounded, followed by cheers and fist-pumps from some of her fellow Last Standers. The Enemy had set off one of the booby traps left behind at the camp. A minute later there was another blast, but then no more. They had left behind a half-dozen of the irreplaceable jury-rigged mining caps. Less than a half-case left now.
At yesterday afternoon’s planning meeting, the War Council had agreed to try to pick up the pace a bit today in the hopes of giving most of the party a good long sleep period on the other side. That optimistic plan was to fall to pieces less than an hour after the booby traps detonated. The advance scouts, Tony and Jessie, suddenly appeared at the head of the trail, looking grim. “Living gully,” Tony said disgustedly.
It was one of the largest and healthiest living gullies Jennifer had ever seen. Its biological control zone, the area where the local plant life was excluded by the thick carpet of toxic tendrils, was fully nine meters across on each side of the spine-line, about twenty meters across in total, and disappeared into the foliage in both directions. The crack which housed the spine-line of the colony was only a half-meter wide, a zigzagging volcanic crack which would be deep and twisted and would afford excellent protection to the communal nerve-sheath and the colonial thropes it had budded. The thropes might number in the hundreds or more, to judge by the size and length of the tendril mat. This gully might be centuries old. Just from where she stood, Jennifer could see at least a dozen mat-lumps in various stages of decomposition; the remains of foolish animals who had ventured onto the tendril mat in search of food or mates. They had died there, alive for days or weeks as the tendril mat digested them from the outside in.
“To the north it runs up into a sheer rock face,” Tony said. “To the south it cuts back the way we came.”
“Well, shit on a stick.” Captain Anders took off his helmet and used it to shade his face as he peered more closely at the gully. “Too wide to bridge and no way to circumnavigate. We’re going to have to burn through. That’ll cost us our lead.”
“It’ll take two, three hours to burn through that,” said Aram Lewitt. A field research biologist before the fall of City, he’d had to deal with living gullies before.
The Captain came to a decision. He took Aram by the arm and led him a few meters away where they spoke in low tones, each of them occasionally gesturing at the gully. The gully itself seemed to have sensed activity in the area; some areas of the tendril mat were starting to twitch.