A Dreamless Sleep

The captain sat alone in the navigation centre of the SS Nephilim, the city-sized star ship designed for deep space exploration and complete self-sufficiency in the uncharted blackness between galaxies.

There were exactly one hundred thousand people on board, but he was the only one awake. Why was he awake? Regular breaks from cryostasis were routine, but not one person at a time, and the next mass awakening wasn’t due for several decades. He paced the vast metal cathedral which housed several towering navigation units, each one possessing multiple redundant layers so the quantum circuitry could persist through the 25,000 year journey to the very edge of our galaxy. He longed to look outside, at something other than the bare metal walls. He reminisced about his youth, about the old-timey science fiction shows that likely subconsciously influenced his latter career choice in the space exploration industry, about how the captain’s deck would be portrayed with a majestic window overlooking the colourful nebulae and star systems. He reflected on how reality was much different, the entire ship was devoid of windows, and beautiful open-planned crew decks had been dispensed with in favour of the practical aspects of withstanding near-light speeds. The hull of the SS Nephilim was impenetrable layers of esoteric metal alloys capable of resisting cosmic radiation and shearing magnetic forces generated by travelling at the blistering edge of what the laws of the universe permitted. Of course, he knew it didn’t matter, there was nothing to look at, just century-long blackness, the hollow void of God.

The title of captain was a misnomer, he was more like a chief engineer. Space travel for the most part was completely automated. Even the computers were for the most part, self-repairing. The totality of the ship’s navigation and central artificial intelligence network was crawling with nanoscopic machines like a hive of eusocial insects, continuously replacing and repairing degenerate loops and lattices of the superconducting quantum circuitry. It was the most advanced technology of a dying world, and represented a singularity: an AI so advanced not only was it capable of mimicking human consciousness in its capacity to learn, it was also capable of upgrading its own circuitry. In essence, a constantly-evolving machine intellect, which was deemed a necessary precaution against the eons of hyper-sleep required for the remnants of the human race to transverse the galaxies, or wherever the next glimmer of hope of a new habitable world would take them.

He clutched the heart-shaped locket at his chest, it was the last memento of his former life. The earth was a dying world, in 2100 AD the earth’s population had reached 16 billion, after which point it began to decline. A combination of exhausted natural resources, and decreasing feasibility of agriculture amongst increasingly toxic air, water, and soil had led to widespread food and medical shortages in the majority of the countries on earth. The necklace had belonged to his wife, and within the heart-shaped locket there was a faded photograph of the two of them together, apparently it had been a common gift centuries ago. At the time he thought it was quaint and anachronistic, but now it was his most treasured possession. Ironically, the nanotechnology that enabled this endless journey through deep space was also the final nail in the coffin of the human race, or rather the remainder of the people on earth. Before the technology was perfected, self-replicating nanobots malfunctioned and started consuming everything. In a cataclysm known as the Ecophagy, the errant machines would eventually strip the entire planet bare, all materials organic and non-organic decomposed into individual atoms and reformed to a vast grey miasma of trillions upon trillions of imperceivable machines. Various organisations and governments had tried to stop them of course, and it had been a slow process lasting centuries, with large areas of the earth’s surface being evacuated and subject to intense heat and radiation in an effort to destroy the sludge-like harbingers of the apocalypse. But destroying machines the size of protozoan was never feasible, and the space arms race that began as a resource battle and attempt at extra-terrestrial colonialism had ended in a frantic race for the survival of the human species.

“Aeon”

The name given to the ship’s eternal, or as good as ever could be achieved with technology, artificial intelligence. Flickering lights streamed across the surface of the ship’s computer cores, and the monolithic presence of the ship’s AI roared into being.

“Patrick Fisher, Ship’s Captain of the SS Nephilim, state your query.”

The hollow machine tones echoed through the empty room, attempts had been made at developing human personality traits for the ship’s AI, but they were all decidedly irritating and had been abandoned in favour of formal functionality.

“Why am I the only one here? This isn’t a scheduled mass awakening, is your software corrupt? I suggest you perform a self-diagnostic”

He could feel the panic rising in his chest, he was still slightly delirious from being in suspended animation for the past 200 years, but even cognitively impaired he knew this was an ominous situation. It was jarring being awoken from stasis, it is entirely in opposition to the warmth of a natural sleep, your frozen neurones rattle back into being and it takes several days to make sense that somehow hundreds of years have passed in the blink of an eye. There are no dreams, your brain is frozen and essentially temporarily dead, so there is no way to conceptualise the missing time. It is disturbing and produces a sort of short-lived dementia.

“My software has been perfected over the course of the last ten millennia, Ship’s Captain Patrick Fisher, there is no capacity for it to malfunction, nor shall it ever malfunction at any point in the future.”

The voice was uncanny, it wasn’t over-loud but seemed to occupy the very air around him. It had a hollow, cold quality. It didn’t sound like a robotic voice per se, as every syllable was perfectly enunciated but it lacked any human warmth.

“Then why was I awoken early?”

Normal human conversation is largely based on inference and implication, he had forgotten how frustrating talking to this thing was, only dealing in rigorous direct inquiry.

“Deviation from protocol……earlier than scheduled refuelling of primary drives required. General maintenance procedures requested for prolonged transit time. 10,000 percent increase on original estimate to nearest habitable world”

2.5 million years!? He felt nauseated, there were not enough resources on board to last that long. How did this happen?

“Why am I the only one awake?!”

His voice quivered with rage now.

“Patrick Fisher, Ship’s Captain and only surviving crew member. You are the only one awake because you are the only one alive.”

It began to dawn on him, in a sickening realisation. This impossibly stoic machine had withdrawn life support measures for everyone on board apart from him, in order to have any chance of completing the impossibly long journey it had stretched out its resources as thinly as possible while still technically preserving its objective of safeguarding the human race. He slumped to the floor, desolated, a god-like computer and the last man alive, trapped together for a near-eternity.